Blood metal analysis of plasmas from donors with and without SARS-CoV-2 using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy and logistic regression

Noureddine Melikechi; Helmar G Adler; Ali Safi; Joshua E Landis; Farhad Pourkamali-Anaraki; Kemal Efe Eseller; Kim Berlo; Danielle Bonito; Gregory R Chiklis; Weiming Xia

doi:10.1364/BOE.513558

Blood metal analysis of plasmas from donors with and without SARS-CoV-2 using laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy and logistic regression

Biomed Opt Express. 2023 Dec 22;15(1):446-459. doi: 10.1364/BOE.513558. eCollection 2024 Jan 1.

Authors

Noureddine Melikechi¹, Helmar G Adler¹, Ali Safi¹, Joshua E Landis¹, Farhad Pourkamali-Anaraki^{1

2}, Kemal Efe Eseller^{1

3}, Kim Berlo⁴, Danielle Bonito⁵, Gregory R Chiklis⁵, Weiming Xia^{1

6

7}

Affiliations

¹ Kennedy College of Sciences, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA 01854, USA.
² Present address: University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO 80204, USA.
³ Department of Electrical - Electronics Engineering, Atilim University, 06836, Ankara, Turkey.
⁴ Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, McGill University, Montreal H3A 0E, Canada.
⁵ MRN Diagnostics, 101 Constitution Blvd, Franklin, MA 02038, USA.
⁶ Bedford VA Healthcare System, Bedford, MA 01730, USA.
⁷ Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine, Boston, MA 02118, USA.

Abstract

Research on the correlation between metal levels in blood and Covid-19 infection has been conducted primarily by assessing how each individual blood metal is linked to different aspects of the disease using samples from donors with various levels of severity to Covid-19 infection. Using logistics regression on LIBS spectra of plasma samples collected pre- and post- Covid-19 pandemic from donors known to have developed various levels of antibodies to the SARS-Cov-2 virus, we show that relying on the levels of Na, K, and Mg together is more efficient at differentiating the two types of plasma samples than any single blood alone.