Pilot study on an innovative biosensor with a range of medical and surgical applications

OBJECTIVES: The objective of this article is to briefly outline the utilization of biosensors in medicine and surgery and present diagnostic efficacy of thermal product (TP) based biosensor. RESULTS: The working principle of biosensor is based on measuring TP of a material in contact with the sensor. When an electrical square wave pulse of certain amplitude and duration is passed through TP based biosensor, the generated heat from its higher resistance will be dissipated and recorded by the sensor. As the surrounding material composition changes, the dissipated heat split between the sensor substrate and surrounding material changes which can be correlated to the change in TP of the material. For biological tissues, it is known that the thermal properties of tissues are quite different for different layers in the body and hence the heat absorbed will be different. The experiments were conducted on biological and non-biological tissues. For data acquisition software LabView 2014 (64-bit) was used and software used for post-processing was MATLAB R2015a (64-bit). The resulting graphs of TP from various materials (oil, water, saline, acetone) and biological tissue (porcine belly, porcine thigh layers and porcine abdominal viscera) expressed prominent deflections indicating diagnostic efficacy of TP based biosensor. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s13104-018-3163-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.