Liquid chromatography for clinical silicon photonics

This PhD project aims to develop a new class of sensors for clinical diagnostics based on cutting- edge silicon photonics research. Adding the capability for chromatography to our existing sensors for mid-infrared absorption spectroscopy will enable more powerful data extraction. This will provide more information for machine learning to improve the accuracy of clinical decision-making.
The project will explore medical applications for this technique with our partners at University Hospital Southampton (UHS). One example is liquid biopsy for cancer diagnostics in which this method can offer improved discrimination between cancerous and non-cancerous blood samples without the need for a surgical biopsy. The project will investigate detection of biomarkers by designing, fabricating and testing sensors for monitoring their unique spectral absorption fingerprints in order to understand the composition of human blood samples. Microfluidic chromatography will be developed for integration with the photonic sensors to obtain further proteomic and lipidomic information.