A bug's death

A rapid, non-invasive device to diagnose bacterial infections is being developed by an international team of engineers and clinicians, with the help of a €1.67m (£1.2m) grant from the EC.

A trauma or burns patient may show no signs of infection, but bacteria could be beginning to colonise their wounds. Results of microbiological swab tests typically take three days to arrive, but in the meantime the patient may have become critically ill. The aim of the project is to design a sensor that would give results in half an hour, so any infection can be treated before it takes hold. Bacteria give off specific cocktails of volatile chemicals as they grow, and the organism could be identified by 'sniffing' these.

'We've combined forces with sensor labs in Italy and Lithuania to create a hybrid gas sensing array to discriminate the volatiles,' said Prof Krishna Persaud of the University of Manchester's school of chemical engineering and analytical science. 'The idea is to create an array of sensors, each of which has a different response to the volatiles. By using pattern recognition based on neural networks, we hope to create a system that will give real-time diagnosis.'