A European scientific collaboration headed by scientists at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain, has produced a small microscope that can help to quickly identify bacterial pathogens and presence of certain biomarker proteins. While the potential of this technology spans across a whole section of medicine, the initial clinical application may be for early diagnosis of sepsis. In the future the team plans on having their technology detect microRNAs, interleukins, and a variety of other disease markers.
Right now identifying a bacterial infection requires culturing samples in a lab, a process that can take many hours while the pathogens are doing their own culturing inside the patient’s body. The new microscopy technique makes culturing unnecessary as it is able to identify and quantify pathogenic items in the sample directly. This is done thanks to special birefringent crystals that help spot how polarized light beams are affected as they pass through a blood sample (see image below). The result is the researchers are able to identify and count bacterial infection within about a half hour, though a proper clinical study has yet to confirm this in practice.
Via: Photonics21…