Highly sensitive nitride-based SPR biosensor for efficient adrenal gland/blood/breast/cervical/skin cancer detection

The current study outlines four extremely sensitive SPR-based cancer sensors that have the highest sensitivity to date for the quick and accurate diagnosis of six major cancer cells, including adrenal gland, breast (t1/t2), cervical, blood, and skin cancer, where the first two are blamed as the most fatal and infected ones, respectively. Four nitrides—AlN, GaN, InN and Si3N4—are employed in four distinct sensor configurations to identify the aforementioned six cancer cell types. The sensor with AlN is found the most suitable for skin/breast (type-1) cancer detection with sensitivity (S) and quality factor (QF) of 370/385 Deg/RIU and 92/113 RIU−1, the GaN based structure for adrenal gland/blood cancer detection with S and QF of 400/400 Deg/RIU and 108/102 RIU−1, the InN-based structure for breast cancer (type-2) detection with S and QF of 414 Deg/RIU and 108 RIU−1, and finally the Si3N4-based structure for cervical cancer detection with S and QF of 341 Deg/RIU and 92 RIU−1, respectively. Furthermore, AlN and GaN based sensors can sense all the six types of cancer cells with a minimum sensitivity of around 230 Deg/RIU, an accepted number as per some recently reported results. Finite element method-based simulator COMSOL is used to study and optimize the structures considering an operating wavelength of 633 nm, anticipating for a low-cost sensor prototype. The highest reported sensitivity in this study is 414 Deg/RIU with QF of 108 RIU−1 for the Au-Ag-InN configuration for the breast cancer (type-2) detection.