Over the past three years, SENTINEL, a global collaboration that includes Texas Engineering researchers, has been developing a new way to monitor patients with prostate cancer. The research effort is one of 11 projects developed through the UT Austin Portugal program, which facilitates collaboration between researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and Portuguese researchers, government organizations and companies.
The project is a collaboration between UT Austin researchers and Stemmatters, INL, Life and Health Sciences Research Institute (ICVS) and Centro Clínico Académico de Braga (2CA Braga). Each group is responsible for a piece of the puzzle that is SENTINEL.
Led by biomedical engineering professor James Tunnell, the UT Austin piece focuses on the development of a Raman spectroscopy device. When targeting a laser light on a certain part of the body, such as the wrist, the molecules present scatter this light in a wavelength characteristic of each molecule, called a “Raman fingerprint.” With the help of a machine learning algorithm developed by the team in Austin, it was possible to identify whether these patterns corresponded to the presence or absence of disease.
