Proceedings Article | 2 March 2022
KEYWORDS: Optical filters, Light emitting diodes, Fluorescence spectroscopy, Refractive index, Mirrors, Thin films, Silica, Plasmonics, Microfluidics, Interferometers
Medical diagnostics in the health care sector rely profoundly on biochemical tests. Reliable, cheap, fast, and compact size tools for performing these tests will revolutionize the diagnostics industry, and enable these devices to be available at clinics or even at patient’s homes. One of the widely utilized diagnostic techniques is fluorescence-based tests. These tests are not limited to medical applications only, but also used in food quality inspection, water quality check, microorganism detection, protein and gene detection, and many other applications. In this paper, we propose a novel lab-on-chip module for fluorescence detection, as a miniaturized version of the common bench-top bulky plate reader. The module can detect and distinguish up to three different fluorophores efficiently. The module consists of multi-color filter sets for excitation and emission, implemented on the same substrate, along with a transparent microfluidic channel to pass the assay through, an excitation sources, and an optical detector to detect the emitted fluorescence light. The emission and excitation filters are thin-film plasmonic filters. Such filters offer high performance, high transmission, and acceptable bandwidth, with a few layers; which reduces the overall cost without compromising the performance. The overall size of the device is in the order of few centimeters. Hence, it consumes the least amount of biological assay. The design of the system allows it to be reliable, portable, user-friendly, fast, and cheap.
