AMBROSIA will develop a disruptive point-of-care (PoC) platform for intelligent diagnosis of sepsis that will offer multiplexed (within a single test) quantification of multiple protein biomarkers and bacteria within a few minutes, providing also real-time disease stage classification and enabling a rapid and precise decision making for therapy and medical actuation. To realize its ambitious goals, AMBROSIA will build upon:
- The adoption of best-in-class integrated CMOS plasmo-photonic devices to deliver noise-resilient multi-channel sensors by combining high-sensitivity aluminum plasmonic stripe waveguides with low-loss Si3N4 photonics. Leveraging dispersion engineered designs and adoption of Bragg grating decorated plasmonic stripes will boost sensitivity from their current ~5,000nm/RIU to unprecedented values of 130000 nm/RIU.
- The co-integration of the plasmo-photonic sensing technology with microelectronics and microfluidics into integrated self-contained disposable sensing chips including on-chip lasers and photodiodes by means of the high-throughput and cost-effective micro-transfer technology (μTP) technology, pioneering the field of manually pluggable disposable sensor chips.
- An electro-optic read-out with optically-enabled artificial intelligence (AI)-based Diagnosis Decision Support System (DDSS), by boosting the integration density and performance envelope of neuromorphic photonics and deploying an ultra-low power photonic Deep Neural Network (DNN) inference engine that will be trained for rapidly deciding upon the severity of the disease.
AMBROSIA will synergize all its constituent technology blocks within a unique PoC diagnostic platform that will be validated with clinical samples from the Hospital Vall d’ Hebron Sepsis Biobank together with samples from healthy donors. A total number of 4 sepsis-related protein biomarkers (CRP, PCT, IL-6, MR-proADM) and 3 bacteria (E. coli, S. aureus, P. aeruginosa) will be simultaneously detected, targeting the successful experimental classification into 4 different sepsis stages (No Inflammation, Inflammation, Sepsis and Septic Shock).
