The biomarkers of many diseases such as malaria can be found in intradermal measurements. We will present two surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) based methods for the detection of malaria biomarkers in blood, which are comparable to or outperform the standard clinical method. To eliminate the need of drawing blood, we will also report a stainless-steel microneedle based probe for direct intradermal SERS measurements. Moreover, we developed a deformable agarose needle to reduce the risk of sharp injury and cross contamination due to needle reuse. Tests in skin phantoms for glucose measurements demonstrated accuracy comparable to those traditional methods requiring blood drawing.
Raman microspectroscopy is well suited for readily revealing information about bio-samples. As such, this technique has been applied to a wide range of areas, especially in bio-medical diagnosis. However, bio-samples typically suffer from low Raman signal level due to the nature of inelastic scattering of photons, To achieve a decent signal level, usually a high numerical aperture is employed. One drawback with these objectives is that their working distance is very short. In many cases of clinic diagnosis, a long working distance is always desired which limits the usage of these objectives. We propose a practical solution to this problem by enhancing the Raman/fluorescence signal by a parabolic reflector. On one hand, the high signal level is achieved by the large solid angle of collection of the parabolic reflector. On the other hand, the long working distance is guaranteed by the novel design of our microscope. The enhancement-capability is demonstrated through five types of samples among which we found the method is most applicable for turbid samples.
In this work, we report a novel substrate for surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) composed of silver nanoparticles protected by small nitrogen-doped Graphene Quantum Dots, i.e. Ag NPs-N-GQDs, synthesized under mild experimental conditions, which can preserve the SERS performance in normal indoor environment for up to 30 days. The field emission scanning electronic microscope (FESEM) images confirm that the N-GQDs play a significant role in the control of metallic nanoparticles morphology. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) result clearly indicates the N-GQDs was successfully immobilized on the surface of silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs). Ag NPs-N-GQDs demonstrated Raman enhancement stronger than pure Ag NPs likely due to an increase in the number of the “hotspots” formed by coupled nanostructures. N-GQD protected Ag NPs were evaluated in SERS measurements of R6G when they were made fresh and have been stored in normal indoors condition for up to 30 days. Then Ag NPs-N-GQDs were used as a SERS substrate for glucose detection. The linearity range of glucose was found to be ranged from 1 μM to 1 M with a detection limit of 0.1 μM in glucose solutions. It was also applied successfully for glucose detection in rat blood samples. The present study demonstrates that the novel Ag NPs−N-GQDs nanostructure has great potential to be used as a cost effective sustained SERS substrate, which can be extremely useful in the wide adoption of SERS based sensors.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.