A low-cost, portable and easy-operated salivary urea sensor for point-of-care application

Kuan-Hsun Wang; Ju-Chun Hsieh; Chang-Chiang Chen; Hsiao-Wen Zan; Hsin-Fei Meng; Sheng-Yu Kuo; Minh Trâm Ngọc Nguyễn

doi:10.1016/j.bios.2019.03.007

A low-cost, portable and easy-operated salivary urea sensor for point-of-care application

Biosens Bioelectron. 2019 May 1:132:352-359. doi: 10.1016/j.bios.2019.03.007. Epub 2019 Mar 7.

Authors

Kuan-Hsun Wang¹, Ju-Chun Hsieh¹, Chang-Chiang Chen², Hsiao-Wen Zan³, Hsin-Fei Meng⁴, Sheng-Yu Kuo⁵, Minh Trâm Ngọc Nguyễn⁴

Affiliations

¹ Department of Photonics, College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 1001, Ta Hsueh Rd., 300 Hsinchu, Taiwan.
² Department of Biological Science and Technology, National Chiao Tung University, 1001, Ta Hsueh Rd., 300 Hsinchu, Taiwan; Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Nephrology, National Taiwan University Hospital Hsin-Chu Branch, 25, Ln. 442, Section 1, Jingguo Rd., 300 Hsinchu, Taiwan. Electronic address: cck85515@gmail.com.
³ Department of Photonics, College of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 1001, Ta Hsueh Rd., 300 Hsinchu, Taiwan. Electronic address: hsiaowen@mail.nctu.edu.tw.
⁴ Institute of Physics, National Chiao Tung University, 1001, Ta Hsueh Rd., 300 Hsinchu, Taiwan.
⁵ Institute of Biomedical Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, 1001, Ta Hsueh Rd., 300 Hsinchu, Taiwan.

PMID: 30897542
DOI: 10.1016/j.bios.2019.03.007

Abstract

Salivary urea was reported to be a useful biomarker to reflect the blood urea nitrogen in chronic kidney disease patients. However, as a new biomarker, enormous clinical trials are required to define the intended-use and to verify the specification. In this report, we demonstrated a low-cost easy-operated real-time sensing system (optical fiber-urea-sensing, OFUS, system) to detect salivary urea. We aim to make the system easily reproduced by the community to stimulate abundant clinical tests worldwide. The OFUS system is composed of a simple three-dimensional printed tank to link with two optical fibers, one connecting with a commercial light-emitting diode to deliver the input light signal, the other connecting with a commercial cadmium sulfide photo-conductive cell to detect the sensing signal. To allow on-site detection without any sample pretreatment, only 1 μl saliva is needed to be mixed with 10 μl urease solution and 90 μl pH indicator solution in the reaction tank and the detection time is only 20 s. A stable and reproducible calibration curve can be easily built with a detection range as 24-300 mg/dL. The OFUS system successfully detected saliva with added synthetic urea and samples from chronic kidney disease patients. A good agreement between the OFUS system and the commercial kit was obtained. A good correlation between salivary urea and the blood urea nitrogen was also confirmed.

Keywords: Non-invasive; Optical fiber; Point-of-care; Real-time; Salivary urea.

Publication types

Evaluation Study

MeSH terms

Biosensing Techniques / economics
Biosensing Techniques / instrumentation*
Equipment Design
Fiber Optic Technology / economics
Fiber Optic Technology / instrumentation*
Humans
Limit of Detection
Point-of-Care Testing* / economics
Renal Insufficiency, Chronic / diagnosis
Saliva / chemistry*
Urea / analysis*
Urease / chemistry

Substances

Urea
Urease