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theses

Sepsis, a potentially deadly immunoresponse to infection, is a major concern in hospitals in the United States. Current laboratory processes used to diagnose and monitor sepsis are costly, time-consuming, or only provide a small piece of information about the complex condition. In order to develop specific individualized treatments for septic patients that do not heavily depend on the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics, a clinician must be provided with both pathogen information about the underlying infection and patient immunoresponse information. While there has been considerable progress towards biosensor designs that can provide pathogen information, there is still a significant demand for designs that can provide immunoresponse information.

The design of a novel biosensing framework has been proposed for gathering information about a patient’s phagocytes, critical components of the innate immune system that protect the body from infection. The design is composed of electrical, microfluidic, and magnetic subsystems that work together to produce a distinct electrical signature signifying the presence of functional phagocytes in a human blood sample. The device has been simulated, fabricated, and experimentally tested using 17 blood samples collected from patients suspected of bacterial infections. Furthermore, two pattern recognition neural networks were developed to analyze and classify the experimental data. One network detects the presence of functional phagocytes in a biological sample with 88.2% accuracy, and the other network diagnoses sepsis with 88.2% accuracy by analyzing these functional phagocytes. This novel framework presents the potential to reduce the mortality rate of sepsis by allowing for earlier diagnosis and treatment.

ETD_10720

M.S.

Includes bibliographical references

doi:10.7282/t3-sxnt-a053

ETD graduate

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