A brand new examine by researchers on the Indian Institute of Science (IISc.) has supplied an alternate to pricking a needle into the pores and skin to detect blood glucose degree in folks affected by diabetes.
According to IISc, “Blood glucose is usually measured using invasive methods involving pricking a small needle in the skin. But people suffering from diabetes have to test their glucose levels many times in a day. This repeated use of needles is inconvenient, and can increase the risk of potential infections.”
Researchers within the Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics (IAP) have supplied an alternate answer through a way referred to as photoacoustic sensing.
In this system, when a laser beam is shone on organic tissue, the tissue elements soak up the sunshine and the tissue heats up barely (lower than 1°C).
This causes the tissue to develop and contract, creating vibrations, which will be picked up as ultrasonic sound waves by delicate detectors.
Different supplies and molecules contained in the tissue soak up totally different quantities of the incident mild at totally different wavelengths, creating particular person ‘fingerprints’ within the emitted sound waves.
Importantly, this process doesn’t injury the tissue pattern being studied.
In the present examine, the crew exploited this method to measure the focus of a single molecule, specifically glucose. They used polarised mild – a light-weight wave that oscillates solely in a particular course. Sunglasses, for instance, scale back glare by blocking out mild waves that oscillate in sure instructions.
Glucose is a chiral molecule, which signifies that it has an inherent structural asymmetry that causes polarised mild to rotate its orientation of oscillation when it interacts with the molecule.
The crew discovered that the depth of the emitted sound waves modified when the orientation of the polarised mild interacting with glucose within the answer was modified.
“We don’t actually know why the acoustic signal changes when we change the polarisation state. But we can establish a relationship between the glucose concentration and the intensity of the acoustic signal at a particular wavelength,” stated Jaya Prakash, Assistant Professor in IAP and corresponding creator of the examine printed in Science Advances.
Glucose rotates the polarised mild and the rotation will increase with focus, which is mirrored within the acoustic sign depth. Therefore, measuring the energy of the acoustic sign allowed the researchers to work backwards and estimate the focus of glucose.
The researchers had been ready to estimate glucose focus in water and serum options in addition to slices of animal tissue with close to scientific accuracy. They had been additionally ready to measure glucose focus at varied depths throughout the tissue precisely.
“If we know the speed of sound in this tissue, we can use the time series data to map our acoustic signals to the depth at which they are coming from,” explains Swathi Padmanabhan, PhD pupil and first creator of the paper.
Since sound waves don’t scatter a lot inside tissue, the researchers had been ready to get correct measurements at varied tissue depths.
Published – March 20, 2025 04:01 pm IST
