Non-Invasive Glucose Monitoring with Lasers
People with diabetes might one day utilize laser research going on at the University of Michigan to painlessly read their glucose levels. Professor Mohammed Islam is leading the reconstruction of super continuum lasers he designed for the military into a non-invasive tool that can measure a teaspoon of glucose in the blood system. The brightness of the laser now increases the signal by several orders of magnitude from the traditionally used tungsten and halogen lamps. Islam hopes to combine the project's electrical processing and algorithms into an easy to use headset that would eliminate the pain associated with daily glucose monitoring through needle induced blood sampling.
Transcript
00:00:00 It is estimated that 200 million people in the world have diabetes and the people who are most passionate about it, we found, are people whose kids have diabetes. They feel bad that they're having to prick the fingers of their kids four, five times a day. On average you have about 1 teaspoon of glucose in your entire body. Put that into perspective, try to measure one foot in two miles. If you can't measure glucose in water in a laboratory, you're never going to measure glucose and blood in a human.
00:00:33 The "Holy Grail" is to make what's called non-invasive glucose monitoring. Measure glucose level without actually having to draw blood. People have actually been trying to work on this for over 30 years and they've used primarily infrared light. Glucose has some very distinct signatures in that wavelength range. The problems been their only light source they had to do these measurements were lamps like you would have on your desk such as tungsten or halogen lamps. In addition to generating a lot of heat they're not very bright. So our game-changing technology are lasers that we have developed for the Department of Defense
00:01:14 but now we're using for medical applications called supercontinuum lasers. So the same kind the laser that works to look for camouflage nets and bombs and other such stuff can be dumbed down because I don't need that kind of power now into something they can look for particular ringing of the glucose because the glucose is hydrocarbon. All this data is then acquired by our software after being processed it gave us the glucose result like this. We can get several orders of magnitude improvement in brightness compared to the tungsten and
00:01:52 halogen lamps that have been used in the past. It has a nice clean spatially coherent beam like a laser just like when you use a laser pointer you can see it very far away. At the same time it's very broad band like a lamp. There's a lot of other clutter and motion and blood and skin that all come in the way you gotta have enough signal; with our improved brightness we think we can get it. Down the road we envision the fiber laser supercontinuum laser that we've developed could be replaced
00:02:24 by LED's, light-emitting diodes. We want to measure in particular the region behind the ear where the blood flows from the heart to the brain. It is an excellent blood flow region and so you might have five LED's and the corresponding electronics all in an over-the-head ear set just like when you're listening to music. Its gonna solve you not have to prick your fingers to measure your glucose. You're not gonna have fingers that hurt (laughs) you're not going to have blood coming out. (laughs)
00:02:55 We invented a way to mix two different polymers together such as they bond together really strongly and efficiently transfer heat. The way that our polymer bonds are made is that we take two polymers in solution...