A Study on Development of a Non Invasive Optical based Instrument to estimate the Bilirubin Concentration in the Blood Serum

Neonatal jaundice is a common physiological disorder that occurs in new born babies with in few weeks of birth due to elevated levels of bilirubin concentration in their blood. The current method of diagnosis is invasive, painful and time consuming. The proposed study focuses on development of non-invasive optical based instrument to estimate the concentration of bilirubin in blood serum. In this study, we have developed a prototype device with 460nm LED light source and Photodiode to estimate the concentration of the bilirubin in human blood serum. The transmitted light rays were analysed using Beer Lambertz law to estimate the concentration of bilirubin in the blood serum. In Phase I, developed prototype was tested using mock bilirubin samples (n=8) with the concentration of 0.03 mg/dL to 0.13 mg/dL. From the test, we had obtained a linear correlation in the bilirubin value estimated by our prototype and the clinical device. In Phase II, we estimated the concentration of the bilirubin level in blood serum samples (n=8) and tested using auto biochemistry analyser in clinical laboratory as well as tested by using our prototype device. We found that the estimated bilirubin concentration from the prototype device had good correlation with the clinical results, with an accuracy of ± 0.1 mg/dL and sensitivity of 0.1 mg/dL. Therefore, the study concludes that the proposed system is able to estimate the bilirubin concentration in the blood serum and this can be further improved for measurement of jaundice in neonates based on skin reflectometry technique in non-invasive manner.