Abstract
We conducted a pilot clinical study to investigate ex vivo fresh human blood from 93 patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). The results indicated that terahertz (THz) time-domain spectroscopy (TDS) can be used to quantify triglyceride (TG) levels in human blood. Based on the TG concentrations and corresponding THz absorption coefficients, the Pearson correlation analysis demonstrated that the THz absorption coefficients have a significant negative linear correlation with TG concentration. Comparisons between the THz measurements at 0.2 THz and an automatic biochemical analyzer were performed using an additional 20 blood samples, and the results confirmed that the relative error was less than 15%. Our ex vivo human blood study indicates that the THz technique can be used to assess blood TG levels in clinical diagnostic practice.
Highlights
We conducted a pilot clinical study to investigate ex vivo fresh human blood from 93 patients with coronary heart disease (CHD)
The results indicated that our measurement has a high repeatability in the frequency range between 0.2 and 0.9 THz, the ratio of the standard deviation to the average value was as low as 1%, and the high water absorption made the data unreliable at higher THz frequencies
Substantial differences in the THz absorption coefficients of human blood were detected between persons in different TG concentration situations, and blood with higher TG levels caused lower THz absorption
Summary
We conducted a pilot clinical study to investigate ex vivo fresh human blood from 93 patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). Recent studies indicated that the THz absorption of the blood is highly sensitive to the concentration of various solutes since a polarized solute changes the collective bending vibration of the hydrogen bonds[14,15,16,17]. Comparisons with existing enzymatic colorimetric assay methods suggest that THz waves can be a potential candidate to monitor the concentrations of TGs in human blood. We conducted a pilot clinical THz study to quantify the concentrations of TGs in ex vivo fresh human blood samples from CHD patients. The use of THz-TDS to quantify TG levels without any other methods was confirmed by a comparative experiment between the THz assay and an automatic biochemical analyzer in the blood of an additional group of 20 CHD. Our investigation demonstrates that THz waves can potentially be used in clinical diagnostics to assay TG levels in CHD patients
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