Sponsor: Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic
Principal investigator: Vlastimil Matějec, Ph.D.
Coordinator: Prof. M. Vrbová, PhD.
Member: Ondřej Podrazký, Ph.D.
From: 2011-01-01
To: 2014-06-30
The project aims is to strengthen the research team at the Faculty of Biomedical Engineering CTU (FBME) which deals with the interaction of the optical (OPT) and extreme ultraviolet (XUV) with biological (BIO) objects. The project part which is done at IPE is to create two groups of academic staff and students of MSc. and PhD. studies, FBME, who will be able to benefit from the use of special optical fibers prepared by the Institute for optical fiber sensors and biosensors. The detection properties of the fiber elements will be, especially in the first phase of the project, characterized in the laboratory IPE and gradually in the newly built labs at the workplace of FBME.
IPE provided special excursions and laboratory practice to FBME students together with lectures which focused on the theme of optical chemical sensors and biosensors for medicine. J. Zajíc completed his dipoma thesis at our institute on the topic of "Detection of pH with fiber optic probes," which used the U shape detection fiber elements (see Fig. 1) from IPE. These elements were prepared at IPE by bending quartz fibers (from 0.2 to 0.4 mm) and were covered by a sol-gel method of the porous layer showing the pH indicator in red.
Fig. 1: Photo of a U shape detection element; Bending diameter 2 mm, bending was fixed in a glass tube
Detection sensitivity was detected by the calibration of elements and the values range from 0.1 to 0.3 db / pH unit within the pH range from 4.2 to 6.8. A healthy patient's saliva pH was measured with the selected detector element, which was about 7