First Demonstration of GaN HEMT-based Hand-held System for Non-Invasive Detection of Traumatic Brain Injury using Saliva

• Published in: IEEE sensors journal p. 1
• Main Authors: Thakur, Rajiv Ranjan, Saini, Anil Kumar, Taliyan, Rajeev, Chaturvedi, Nidhi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 07.12.2023
• Subjects: Antigens; Biomarkers; Biosensors; hand-held system; HEMT biosensors; HEMTs; Logic gates; MODFETs; Non-invasive; saliva; Sensors; TBI
• ISSN: 1530-437X; 1558-1748
• DOI: 10.1109/JSEN.2023.3334364

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is an insult to the brain caused by an external mechanical force that is neither congenital nor degenerative leading to morbidity and mortality among people of various age groups globally. The work report design, development, and validation of novel GaN HEMT on Si-based hand-held system for non-invasive detection of FDA-approved TBI biomarkers UCH-L1 and GFAP in clinically relevant concentration ranges. The developed system can detect and differentiate TBI biomarkers in saliva in almost imperceptible amount of pg/ml using specific conjugation of TBI antibody and target analyte over bio-functionalized chips. The platform offers a peak sensitivity of 17.42 μA/pg/ml with high resolution and a pre-eminent selectivity towards target TBI biomarkers. The system is portable, easy to handle, ultra-sensitive with volant response time of less than 5s, and compact with a potential for point-of-care applications. It can be utilized for clinical analysis and on-field application areas for TBI diagnosis and prognosis. The system can be imperative in early medical diagnosis, patient management, and decision-making for C.T. or MRI. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-time reporting of a label-free noninvasive TBI detection system based on GaN HEMT on Si.