Festival of Light- Introducing the Proteus Project

A presentation by members of the team from University of Edinburgh and Heriot-Watt University:
The PROTEUS project is the UK’s largest optical imaging project geared towards clinical application. Funded by the EPSRC and launched in October 2013, it brings together a multidisciplinary team of chemists, clinicians, biologists, engineers, optical physicists, image analysts, machine learners, signal processors, NHS partners, Industry and commercialisation support to deliver a transformative point-of-care immediate sensing device for pulmonary critical care. The team comprises 16 Post Doctoral Scientists, 24 PhDs and 10 Investigators with 200 man years of effort focussed on developing a next generation platform. PROTEUS will develop a Fibre-based Optical Sensing and Imaging Platform (FOSIP) that will provide ground-breaking dynamic sensing of key physiological and pathological events in the distal lung and blood of critically-ill ventilated patients that will lead to significant healthcare improvement.
FOSIP aims to allow clinicians to simultaneously and dynamically sense and image multiple pivotal physiological and pathological targets in the distal lung and in the blood of critically ill ICU patients. This will be achieved through the integration of fibre-based multiplexed optical sensing capability with unique Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS) to measure physiological parameters and fluorescent molecular SmartProbes to allow simultaneous multiplexed real-time monitoring of biological targets via a single optical fibre inserted directly into an arterial/standard blood sampling-line and via pulmonary micro-endoscopy and the local instillation of ‘microdoses’ of exquisitely sensitive and disease target specific SmartProbes.