Sepsis Diagnosis via Integrated Breath Sensing System with Change-Point Detection for Real-Time Point-of-Care

Every 2.8 seconds someone dies from sepsis: 11 million people annually, out of which children under 5-years old.

Septic shock is the potentially fatal body’s dysregulated response to pathogens that spread through blood circulation, including viruses like SARS-CoV-2. Half of sepsis cases happen in ICUs with 42% morality, with costs of €30 000 per case and €20 billion per year.

Current diagnosis protocols rely on observation of the clinical symptoms to initiate regular monitoring of patients’ vital signs.

Blood analyses and other tests identify the source of infection within 2-5 days, during which broad-spectrum antibiotics are administered, contributing to antibiotic resistance. Every hour of delay increases the mortality rate by 5-10%. Hence, early diagnosis of the infection source is a major step towards treatment.

Pre-clinical and commercial point-of-care devices reduce the analysis time to few hours but still rely on the manifestation of clinical symptoms and invasive blood-based assays.

SepsISensoR will advance the sepsis diagnosis protocol by non-invasive real-time monitoring of ICU patients’ breath to detect pre-symptomatic signs of sepsis based on transient changes of gas biomarkers in early sepsis stages.

This will be achieved by: (a) integrating commercial gas sensors with fabricated preconcentrators on a single chip for high sensitivity, efficient and scalable multiple gas sensing; (b) using on-line change-point detection (CPD) on the breath signal to identify temporal variations of single- and multi-gas concentration; (c) validating the system with gases released from in vitro and in vivo models of sepsis.

SepsISensoR will go beyond the state-of-the-art by reducing diagnosis time, and in turn reducing time in ICUs, cost, and sepsis fatalities.

This aligns with Pillar I Excellent Science MSCA fellowship under the European Research Council and Key Strategic Orientation A with Cluster 1 of the Work Programme on technologies for healthy society.