An Interferometric Reflectance Imaging Sensor for Point of Care Viral Diagnostics

Abstract—The use of in vitro diagnostic devices is transition-ing from the laboratory to the primary care setting to address early disease detection needs. Time critical viral diagnoses are of-ten made without support due to the experimental time required in today’s standard tests. Available rapid point of care (POC) viral tests are less reliable, requiring a follow-on confirmatory test be-fore conclusions can be drawn. The development of a reliable POC viral test for the primary care setting would decrease the time for diagnosis leading to a lower chance of transmission and improve recovery. The single particle interferometric reflectance imaging sensor (SP-IRIS) has been shown to be a sensitive and specific-detection platform in serum and whole blood. This paper presents a step towards a POC viral assay through a SP-IRIS prototype with automated data acquisition and analysis and a simple, easy-to-use software interface. Decreasing operation complexity highlights the potential of SP-IRIS as a sensitive and specific POC diagnostic tool. With the integration of a microfluidic cartridge, this automated in-strument will allow an untrained user to run a sample-to-answer viral assay in the POC setting. Index Terms—Automation, biosensors, label-free, nanoparticle detection, point-of-care, virus detection