CENTRUM FÖR MEDICINSK TEKNIK OCH FYSIK

Spectroscopic measurements for fast diagnostics

Sweden currently has about 350 000 diabetes patients. It is estimated that half of them will be affected with a secondary disease in the form of nerve damage, something that could lead to amputation. As prognoses from the World Health Organization (WHO) is predicting the number of people with diabetes will have doubled by 2035, a project from Umeå University is working on a way to detect nerve damage at a sooner stage.

University lecturer Britta Lindholm-Sethson is in charge of the project and explains the work with non-invasive methods for measuring skin changes.
“We perform skin measurements to analyze the collected data and then be able to relate it to a certain medical condition.”
The method can, except for diabetes patients, be applied on people with for example skin cancer, allergies, erythema and neuropathy. The examination is done with a patented probe and the main goal of the project is to widen the probe’s field of use within medical as well as odontological research.

Measuring skin changes is done by placing the probe against the skin and then, using a pump, creating a negative pressure. That way you can reproducibly collect a large amount of information in forms of different wave spectra. Using multivariate computer analysis, a statistical method enabling analysis of large amounts of data without losing specific information, the collected measured values are then evaluated.
“From these different spectra we get information about the specific skin change” says Lindholm-Sethson.
Today, combination probes as well as digital photography is used for analysis and diagnostics in skin changes. But the goal is for a combination probe to replace the other methods and in a fast and accurate way provide the desirable measure values. There is a big need as well as interest for the validity check of the measurement probe as a tool for diagnostics. There is no such instrument on the market today, but it is estimated that there is a need for 10 000 of them every year.

Within the project is also the work with measuring cells for control of materials used for dental work. When dental plaster cracks, colonies of bacteria can gather and cause severe infections.  Here, impedance measurements can be used to examine the resistance and durability of different plasters. The instrument being developed has every possibility of becoming a useful tool for developing dental plasters at laboratories for dental prosthetics.

“This is another very important field” says Lindholm-Sethson. Bad dental work can cause tremendous pain.
“At the same time you want the process to be as fast as possible, so people are trying different kinds of superglue, which don’t always last like they are supposed to. By finding out beforehand what dental materials will last and not, you can avoid a lot of suffering” concludes Lindholm-Sethson.