Global Health
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Nano-engineered surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy substrates for probing tissue-material interactions
Innovation in biomaterials has brought both breakthroughs and new challenges in medicine, as implant materials have become increasingly multifunctional and complex. One of the greatest issues is the difficulty in assessing the temporal and multidimensional dynamics of tissue-implant interactions. Implant biology remains hard to decipher without a noninvasive and multiplexed technique that can accurately monitor…
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Towards Breath Based Diagnostics via Water-mediated Capture of Synthetic Breath Biomarkers in SERS-active Plasmonic Nanogaps
Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are valuable health indicators, with synthetic breath biomarkers offering rapid and disease-specific diagnostics. However, their <100 ppb level exhalation requires mass spectrometry, limiting clinical integration. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) offers a portable, cost-effective alternative. Yet, detecting synthetic breath biomarkers, with inherently low Raman cross-sections, at <100 ppb remains challenging. We demonstrate…
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Rapid, antibiotic incubation-free determination of tuberculosis drug resistance using machine learning and Raman spectroscopy
Tuberculosis (TB) is the world’s deadliest infectious disease, with over 1.5 million deathsand 10 million new cases reported anually. The causative organism Mycobacterium tuber-culosis (Mtb) can take nearly 40 d to culture, a required step to determine the pathogen’santibiotic susceptibility. Both rapid identification and rapid antibiotic susceptibility testingof Mtb are essential for effective patient treatment…
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Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) Improves Classification Accuracy of Bacterial Raman Spectral Data Enabling Portable Diagnostics
Antimicrobial resistance is expected to claim 10 million lives per year by 2050, and resource-limited regions are most affected. Raman spectroscopy is a novel pathogen diagnostic approach promising rapid and portable antibiotic resistance testing within a few hours, compared to days when using gold standard methods. However, current algorithms for Raman spectra analysis 1) are…