Will this contraption work?

One of the biggest obstacles to the accurate diagnosis of pneumonia is determining whether an expectorated sample is representative of the upper airway/oral cavity (representing colonization or, at most, tracheobronchitis) or the lower respiratory tract (representing a true pathogen).

A group from the Georgia Institute of Technology recently developed a gadget they claim can separate lower respiratory from upper respiratory aerosols. The report can be found here, in the Journal of Medical Devices.