Image sensing technology can detect Alzheimer disease
Developed by professor Kazuaki Sawada and Dr. Takigawa of the Toyohashi University of Technology, Tokyo, the system utilises a charge coupled device (CCD) imaging sensor, developed by the Toyohashi University. This chip is sensitive to extremely small changes in electrical potential and to microbeads serving as carrier medium for antigen-antibody reactions. With this technology, it is possible to monitor and diagnose diseases for which specific markers are known. For the test, very small volumes of blood or urine are needed. Specifically, this technology can detect amyloid beta-peptide, an agent responsible for Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers state in a press release.
The technology is used for early diagnosis of diseases by detecting specific proteins as the antigen for this respective disease. Conventional protocols used to monitor antibody-antigen reactions employ fluorescent probes and detection of fluorescence with microscopic cameras – a time-consuming process since it is necessary to measure fluorescence from the probes. In addition, these technologies are not as sensitive as the new method based on a CCD chip.
With the new technology, an antigen-antibody reaction is used as in conventional methods, but fluorescence is not measured. Instead, this method employs a semiconductor image sensor to detect minute changes in electric potential generated during an antigen-antibody reaction.
The semiconductor image sensor [Fig. 1] consists of 128 × 128 pixels that independently sense minute changes in electric potential.
Fig.1: A CCD sensor helps improving the early diagnosis for diabetes and Alzheimer diseaese – at a fraction of the cost of conventional systems
The detection sensitivity of antigen-antibody reactions was significantly increased by using microbeads [Fig. 2]. Multiple diseases can also be simultaneously diagnosed by placing different antibodies on different sensing pixels out of a total of 16,384 pixels (128×128).
Fig. 2: The usage of microbeads helps drastically improving the sensitivity of the process.
Implementation of the technology will be tested for daily control of lifestyle diseases such as diabetes. The researchers say that in future the technology will be expanded for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’ diseases. With the new technology, the cost for a diagnosis can be reduced by a factor of ten.
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