Quantitative Luminescence Photography of a Swellable Hydrogel Dressing with a Traffic-Light Response to Oxygen.

Abstract

Sensor-integrated wound dressings are emerging tools applicable to a wide variety of medical applications from emergency triage to at-home monitoring. Uncomfortable, unnecessary wound dressing changes may be avoided by providing quantitative insight into tissue characteristics related to wound healing such as tissue oxygenation, pH, and exudate/transudate volume. Here, a simple cost-effective methodology for quantifying oxygen and pH in a swellable hydrogel dressing using a single photograph is presented. The red and green luminescence of a novel dendritic polyamine Pt-porphyrin and fluorescein conjugate quantitatively responds to oxygen and pH, respectively, and enables robust sensing. The porphyrin conjugate, when combined with a four-arm star polyethylene glycol (PEG) amine polymer, rapidly crosslinks at room temperature with an N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS)-PEG crosslinker to form a color-changing hydrogel dressing with tunable swelling capabilities applicable to a variety of wound environments. An inexpensive digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera modified with bandpass filters captures the hydrogel luminescence using simple macroscopic photography, and conversion to HSB colorspace allows for intensity-independent image analysis of the hydrogels' dual modality response. The hydrogel formulation exhibits a robust and validated visible red-orange-green "traffic light" spectrum in response to oxygen changes, regardless of swelling state, pH, or autofluorescence from skin, thereby enabling the clinician friendly naked-eye feedback.

• Authors: Haley L Marks, Katherine Cook, Emmanuel Roussakis, Juan Pedro Cascales, Jeremy T Korunes-Miller, Mark W Grinstaff, Conor L Evans
• Journal: Advanced healthcare materials (Adv Healthc Mater) Vol. 11 Issue 10 Pg. e2101605 (05 2022) ISSN: 2192-2659 [Electronic] Germany
• PMID: 35120400 (Publication Type: Journal Article)
• Copyright: © 2022 Wiley-VCH GmbH.

Chemical References

• Hydrogels
• Porphyrins
• Polyethylene Glycols
• Oxygen

Topics

• Bandages
• Hydrogels
• Luminescence
• Oxygen
• Photography
• Polyethylene Glycols
• Porphyrins