Currently, there are various techniques for clinical diagnosis of infections. During the last pandemic caused by Sars-CoV-2, the importance and need for rapid, economical and accessible diagnostic systems became evident. Demonstrating that they are fundamental tools in the prevention and control of diseases. Thus, Point-of-Care (PoC) devices emerge as an alternative with the potential to improve access to the diagnosis of infectious diseases. These are devices that allow immediate diagnosis in low-complexity centers, reducing costs, streamlining the analysis, and, above all, considerably increasing the confidence intervals of the diagnoses. Many of the most used clinical diagnostic techniques base their determination on optical techniques, mostly colorimetric and fluorescent. These types of determinations are gaining wide attention as non-destructive tools, visible to the human eye, and capable of providing real-time and in-situ responses. The present work seeks to provide alternatives for better PoC diagnostic systems. We will focus on colorimetric determinations, widely used in nucleic acid amplification tests. However, they have the disadvantage of depending, in certain cases, on the subjectivity of the person analyzing the sample (visual diagnosis). Following this, a portable colorimetric device was developed, capable of objectively discretizing between positive and negative tests. Specifically, by performing spectral analysis of each sample and evaluating its absorbance in the visible spectrum.
In recent years, Argentina and countries of the region, have suffered epidemics associated with arboviruses, mainly Dengue and more recently Zika and Chikungunya. On the other hand, since the worldwide pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19), people’s health and the economic support of their countries have been seriously affected. It is necessary to have economic and faster diagnostic tools that allows evaluating samples of patients with symptoms. With this objective, diagnostic systems called point of care have been recently developed. These systems are defined as medical diagnostic testing at or near the point of care (that is, at the time and place of patient care). Specifically, in this work, a bio-photonic device has been developed. This instrument is able to detect certain diseases by means of a luminescence spectral analysis. This method can be conducted for saliva samples. The system consists in the fluorescence signal detection generated by a specific probe of the target viral genome, that coupled to isothermal amplification reaction, allowing the detection of the pathogen in the sample. The device excites the sample to be analyzed with light (led or semiconductor lasers with specific wavelengths) thus it triggers a spontaneous emission of the fluorophore bound to the specific probe. The emitted fluorescence is suitably filtered using interferential filters. These filters limit the spectral regions and allow discriminating the analysis band. Under these conditions, a signal is registered in a built-in detector and, depending on the signal level, define the case as positive or negative. All the analysis is done autonomously inside the developed device through an integrated control system and it is connected to a portable device to show the results wirelessly.
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