Quartz Crystal Microbalance for Medical Diagnostics

The research is to develop techniques to improve disease detection using a Quartz Crystal Microbalance (QCM) to induce and detect the Bond Rupture of the antibody–antigen bonds. In this paper a short introduction to QCM is presented and the techniques of how it is used to detect the bond rupture are reviewed. Issues involved in the detection such as frequency stability, viscosity, temperature control and others are discussed. Experimental setup is built where closed-loop temperature control is implemented using PID, and Network Analyzer is used to provide accurate resonant frequency measurements in conjunction with Matlab to automate measurements. Preliminary meaningful results with in liquid measurements of QCM’s are given in the paper