Tech Briefs Magazine - April 2021 - 44

Health & Biotech
Radiopaque Glue Seals Wounds and Guides Surgery
This nanoparticle-based adhesive is visible in common imaging techniques such as computed
tomography (CT).
Institute for Basic Science, Daejeon, Korea

s open surgery has gradually been
replaced by minimally invasive and
image-guided procedures, tissue adhesives are taking the place of sutures
and surgical staples. With countless
applications in angioplasty, stent inser-

tion, and biopsies, new surgical glues are
highly desired.
Researchers have created a surgical
glue that is both adherent and visible in
the most common imaging techniques:
fluoroscopy, ultrasound, and computed

Nanoparticles made with a shell of silica (SiO2) and a core of radiopaque tantalum oxide (TaOx) are
used to make a tissue adhesive and are visible to ultrasound, X-ray, and fluorescence imaging.

tomography (CT). The nanoparticlebased tissue adhesive features properties
that were successfully tested in sealing a
liver puncture and in conducting operations moving organs such as the lung and
limbs.
The nanoparticles have a shell made of
silica (SiO2) and a core of radiopaque tantalum oxide (TaOx). Silica holds the tissue
together while TaOx provides contrast enhancement on ultrasound and CT. The
TaOx/SiO2 core/shell nanoparticle (TSN)
glue was found to be clearly visualized by
real-time imaging modalities and exhibits
adhesive properties similar to that of
cyanoacrylate and Lipiodol (CA-Lp), a
mixture of a tissue adhesive and radiopaque oil used in clinical practice.
Beyond adhesive properties, TSN is biocompatible and ensures accurate target
localization during movement. The adhesive is well fixed to tissues so that nanoparticles and tissues move in unison.
For more information, contact Shi Bo Shim
at sibo@ibs.re.kr; +82-42-878-8189.

Smartphone-Based Diabetes Detector
This technology could be a low-cost, in-home alternative to blood draws and clinic-based
screening tools.
University of California, San Francisco

esearchers have developed a " digital
biomarker " that would use a smartphone's built-in camera to detect diabetes. The tool could assist in identifying
people at higher risk of having diabetes,
ultimately helping to decrease the prevalence of undiagnosed diabetes.
Screening tools that can be deployed
easily using technology already contained in smartphones could rapidly
increase the ability to detect diabetes
including populations out of reach of
traditional medical care. To date, noninvasive and widely scalable tools to detect
diabetes have been lacking, motivating
development of the algorithm.

In developing the biomarker, the
researchers hypothesized that a smartphone camera could be used to detect
vascular damage due to diabetes by
measuring signals called photoplethysmography (PPG), which most mobile
devices including smartwatches and fitness trackers are capable of acquiring.
The researchers used the phone flashlight and camera to measure PPGs by
capturing color changes in the fingertip
corresponding with each heartbeat.
The team obtained nearly 3 million
PPG recordings from 53,870 patients
who used the Azumio Instant Heart Rate
app on the iPhone and reported having

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been diagnosed with diabetes by a
healthcare provider. This data was used
to both develop and validate a deeplearning algorithm to detect the presence of diabetes using smartphonemeasured PPG signals.
Overall, the algorithm correctly identified the presence of diabetes in up to
81 percent of patients in two separate
datasets. When the algorithm was tested
in an additional dataset of patients
enrolled from in-person clinics, it correctly identified 82 percent of patients
with diabetes. Among the patients that
the algorithm predicted did not have
diabetes, 92 to 97 percent did not have
Tech Briefs, April 2021

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Tech Briefs Magazine - April 2021

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