Fabrication of electrochemical pH sensor for implantable biochip

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As of recent reports released by the Centre for Disease Control and Health Canada, over 52 M surgeries are performed annually in North America. Of the 52M surgeries, around 3.1M surgeries are considered to be of high risk. One of the major complications that can happen following gastrointestinal surgeries is the leakage of bodily fluid into the peritoneal cavity (anastomotic leakage). Early diagnosis and management of anastomotic leakage is critical to decreasing the risk of morbidity and mortality from the surgeries performed. The most common medical practices nowadays to detect such abdominal post-operative complications is to use the patients' feedback, imaging techniques, blood tests, and nurse follow-ups to assess the patient's condition after the surgery. These methods, however, are subject to a number of problems, errors, biases and are inefficient economically. The supporting company NERv, is developing an implantable biochip with multiple biosensors (including pH sensor) capable of detecting post-operative complications in real-time. The current project aims to fabricate a pH sensor capable of measuring real-time pH with high accuracy, and to make the pH sensor very small with low power consumption and biocompatibility, so that it can be embedded into NERv's biochip, which will be implanted into the body near the surgical site to monitor the abdominal (peritoneal) fluids in real time and identify anastomotic leakage as it happens.