Early diagosis of malaria using surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy.

Abstract

Malaria still remains one of most deadly diseases in the world of today and we summarize and cross compare different methodologies used in the current technology for early diagnosis of malaria parasites. Hemozoin is a biocrystal which produced by malaria parasites during digesting the hemoglobin within host cells. It has unique optic properties which has been studies in recent years using various optic technologies for detection of malaria. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) has been widely used to enhance the optic signal for measuring the properties of molecules due to its powerful magnification of signal strength. To achieve the goal of detecting malaria in the low concentration, we utilize SERS in this project and several approaches were taken to achieve the best signal enhancement. Subsequently, with detection of Raman shift with different parasite concentrations, we also establish a mathematical correlation between the two.