Portable Electromagnetic Multi-Band Resonator for Instantaneous SARS-CoV-2 Detection

In this paper, a highly sensitive portable multiband resonator is employed as a sensor to instantaneously detect the presence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. At its core, the sensor leverages the interaction between the resonating electromagnetic waves and the sample under test and extract the resulting changes in the corresponding scattering parameters. Once these changes are recorded, machine learning data analytics algorithms are applied to correlate these changes with the presence or absence of the virus in the sample. The proposed sensor is fabricated and validated in pre-clinical and clinical settings. Pre-clinical measurements on SARS-CoV-2 heat-inactivated viral phosphate-buffered saline (PBS)-based samples with distinct viral concentrations demonstrated an enhanced sensitivity towards change in the SARS-CoV-2 viral concentration with a 1.92% mean absolute relative error of prediction. Clinical measurements on nasopharyngeal (NP) swabs diluted in PBS samples reported a high accuracy of 94%, a sensitivity of 95%, and a specificity of 97.5%. These results are highly promising and they manifest the potential of the proposed sensor to substitute current test kits and fit point-of-care settings for instantaneous SARS-CoV-2 viral detection.