Fabrication of electrochemical pH sensor for implantable biochip

根据加拿大疾病控制和卫生中心最近发布的报告，北美每年进行超过5200万例手术。在5200万例手术中，约310万例手术被认为具有高风险。胃肠道手术后可能发生的主要并发症之一是体液泄漏到腹膜腔中（吻合口漏）。吻合口瘘的早期诊断和治疗对于降低手术的发病率和死亡率至关重要。现在检测这种腹部手术后并发症的最常见的医疗实践是使用患者的反馈、成像技术、血液测试和护士随访来评估患者在手术后的状况。然而，这些方法受到许多问题、错误、偏差的影响，并且在经济上效率低下。支持公司NERv正在开发一种具有多个生物传感器（包括pH传感器）的植入式生物芯片，能够实时检测术后并发症。当前项目的目标是制造一种能够高精度实时测量pH值的pH传感器，并将pH传感器做得非常小，功耗低，具有生物相容性，这样就可以将其嵌入NERv的生物芯片中，将其植入手术部位附近的体内，以真实的实时监测腹腔（腹膜）液，并在发生吻合口瘘时识别吻合口瘘。

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.