Traumatic Brain Injury
Atom Optoelectronics | 440 Hindry Avenue, Unit E, Los Angeles CA 90301 | Tel: 310-641-1338, Fax: 310-641-1338
OFETs/CNTFETs for Biosensing Applications
What is Traumatic Brain Injury?
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a physical injury to the brain resulting from a variety of causes including vehicle crashes, falls, sports related injuries, military combat, and assaults. As a result, the severity of the injury can fluctuate in degree from mild to severe, sometimes resulting in death. While TBI mostly prompts physical damage to the brain, it is also associated with an array of psychological and hrmonal problems. These include cognitive disabilities, sleep pattern problems, lack of attention, dizziness, confusion, etc.
Current Diagnosis of TBI
TBI is currently diagnosed with a subjective physical examination, psychological screen and the typical Glascow test. The patient's injury is usually confirmed with a CT scan. CT scans are effective in depicting bleeding around the brain as well as swelling, but limited in their ability to diagnose mild TBI, especially concussions. MRIs are more powerful in their imaging ability in comparison to CT scans. But like CT scans, they are unable to detect injury to nerve fibers inside the brain. Hence, axonal damage remains undetectable in most occasions. Other radiological exams like positron emission tomography scans are developed for mild TBI but with extremely high cost. The most successful first response test is the imPACT test, which is computerized version of the physical and psychological tests. It allows health care personnel to diagnose TBI at the scene of injury by using an integrated electronic applications, but not reliable.
Atom's Technology
Atom Optoelectronics has developed methods to scalably produce electronically pure single-chirality single-walled carbon nanotubes with no variation in electrical properties and chem-/bio-interfaces, conferring consistent and repeatable electronic devices for biodetection.
Atom Optoelectronics has developed air-stable thin film field effect transistors based on these nanotubes with high ION/IOFF ratio (>10^8). These field effect transistor devices outperform chemiresistors and amperometric/potentiometric sensors in terms of detection limits and sensitivity resulting from the signal amplification by gate modulation. Additionally, these field effect transistors can be easily incorporated into sensor circuits such as ring oscillators and power gain differential amplifiers to enhance detection performance parameters such as low detection limits and background elimination. Moreover, these integrated sensor circuits can be remotely powered and read-out through wireless communications, and can be further combined with microfluidic channels for real-time monitoring of implanted patients. The end goal of this project is to develop a continuous TBI monitoring system.