Why Avantes for your (bio)Medical application?

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• Thermal stability of optical bench with 8 hour test validation

• Ultra-low stray light design

• Precise timing controls over instruments to ensure repeatable measurement procedures.

• Option to separate electronics board and optical bench modules

• High numerical aperture optical bench (HS) design for maximum light collection

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Medical and Biomedical researchers and OEMs frequently utilise spectroscopy techniques for clinical and research processes.  Ultra-violet, visible and near infrared wavelength ranges are measured for a variety of medical and biomedical applications. Fibre optic based spectrometers offer a great value to the industry due to their ability to facilitate in situ (in vivo) measurements within clinical settings. The fibre optic interface is often exploited for low cost, disposable testing procedures. Low cost instruments also present the opportunity to bring the lab to the patient.

 

Biomedical analysis can benefit from the superior price to performance ratio realised with using fibre optic spectrometers in place of traditional, higher priced instruments and detectors. Avantes works with the Medical and Biomedical applications such as blood analysis (co-oximetry), endoscopy, tissue fluorescence, capillary electrophoresis, phototherapy and many others. Experiences in these industries range from OEM component supplier to research system configurator.

Avantes are also involved in projects like inSPECT, a European project which aims for real-time cancer diagnosis with miniature spectrometers. 

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Co-Oximetry and Blood Analysis

Co-oximetry is a spectrophotometric methodology which employs Beer-Lambert law absorption principles to measure blood gas parameters. This analysis is typically done using in the visible light wavelength range (380-780nm).  The blood gas parameters which can be measured by co-oximetry include total hemoglobin (tHb), Oxyhomoglobin (O₂Hb), Deoxyhemoglobin (HHb), Methemoglobin (MetHb), Carboxyhemoglobin (COHb) and bilirubin (tBil).  Oxygen saturation in blood can also be measured by co-oximetry and this method is preferable to the use of SO₂c which is also known as calculated oxygen saturation.

Avantes AvaSpec ultra-low stray light spectrometers (ULS) are ideally suited to co-oximetry measurements.  Stray light can introduce undesirable error into spectroscopic measurements and there are few applications where error reduction is more critical than co-oximetry.  The AvaSpec-ULS design also provides critical thermal and mechanical stability which provides for critical wavelength stability in this application.  All Avantes instruments are thermally tested in a 8 hour thermal cycling test to ensure our instruments have wavelength stability over various temperature ranges.  The two most commonly used instruments for this application are the AvaSpec-ULS2048L-USB2 and AvaSpec-ULS2048-USB2.

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