Project
| # | Title | Team Members | TA | Documents | Sponsor |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | PathTracker: A Smartphone Clip-on Sensor of HIV Virus |
Qingxi Meng Yunxiao Diao |
Amr Martini | design_document1.pdf final_paper1.docx presentation2.pptx proposal1.pdf video1.mp4 |
|
| Team Members (NetID) Qingxi Meng (qm2) | Yunxiao Diao (yunxiao2) | Zhifeng Ou (zo2) Problem: HIV patients undergoing anti-retroviral therapy need to perform frequent blood test and monitor their body condition and effectiveness of the treatment. Therefore, a self-testing, high-sensitivity device requiring no laboratory expertise will be very helpful in this scenario. Solution Overview: This project is initially proposed by Prof. Cunningham in ECE department. We are collaborating with the BioE group and other graduate students. Therefore, our task will NOT include the production of HIV sample and the assay cartridge. Our work is a smartphone clip-on device for rapid and simple HIV monitoring. It has a special shape cradle to cope with designed assay cartridge that holds patients’ blood sample. The device will be composed of a macro lens, a ring-shape LED illuminator, a heater, an optical filter, and a rechargeable battery. It will be aligned with the phone camera, which enables patient to take photo/film of the test sample for further analysis. Heating Subsystem: This portion is composed of a rechargeable battery and a simple, PTC (Positive Temperature Coefficient) heater. The heater is required for the reaction in RT-LAMP assay for HIV monitoring. Both components will be connected to the PCB board. Optical Subsystem: This portion is composed of a ring-shape LED illuminator, an optical filter, a macro Lens and the PCB board. The fluorescent chemical in the assay will absorb light from the LED, being filtered with certain wavelength (525 – 550 nm), and then captured by the microscope and phone camera. The illumination process is controlled by the PCB board. Cradle component: We plan to use a 3D printed cradle to clip on the smartphone. It will hold both the heating and optical subsystem. Software Subsystem: With the hardware components completly finished, we also have a plan to work on the software side of the project, which includes an image processing algorithm to evaluate the density of HIV virus, as well as an application (PC or Phone) with user interface. Criterion for Success : Given a HIV assay, our implementation should correctly trigger the desired reaction and capture a clear footage which contains foci of fluorescence. Specifically, all hardware components should work collectively as intended. The heater is controlled to be on set temperature (around 65C) to trigger the chemical reaction of HIV. The illuminator should be operating in a proper wavelength. The macroscope, optical filter and the camera will be aligned to capture clear footage of the sample with the assay cartridge injected in the cradle. Ideally, if time allowed, we will also implement an image processing algorithm on phone or PC to correctly count the foci of fluorescence in the footage. However, this is optional since the image processing algorithm may be very hard to design and implement. |
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