Objective: Careful screening of bilirubin level in newborns is mandatory as per American Academy of Pediatrics (2004), to reduce incidents of kernicterus and acute bilirubin encephalopathy. Although invasive capillary collection of blood and subsequent biochemical test is considered a gold standard for jaundice detection in neonates, transcutaneous bilirubin (TcB) measurement using various non-invasive instruments is also used sporadically across the globe. The major aim of this study was to develop a non-invasive spectrometry-based technique for measurement of neonatal bilirubin level as an alternative of total serum bilirubin (TSB) test without limitations of other available bilirubinometers. Methods: The instrument comprised of a light source and a spectroscopic detector. A light beam from source incident on the neonatal nail plate through optical fibers. The retro reflected light is acquired using the detector. An indigenously developed software used to acquire and analyze the optical signal and to calculate the bilirubin value. The instrument was calibrated and validated in reference to TSB on 1033 subjects. Major results: The result (r=0.95 and P<0.001), indicates a strong correlation between the bilirubin value obtained from our method and TSB. Time variant analysis of the subjects undergoing phototherapy provided a good correlation (r = 0.98). The repeatability test, result shows the mean coefficient of variation less than 5.0%. Conclusions: The indigenously developed non-invasive technique, successfully detects the bilirubin under various physiological conditions with high accuracy and precision.

Anemia severely and adversely affects human health and socioeconomic development. Measuring hemoglobin with the minimal involvement of human and financial resources has always been challenging. We describe a translational spectroscopic technique for noncontact hemoglobin measurement at low-resource point-of-care settings in human subjects, independent of their skin color, age, and sex, by measuring the optical spectrum of the blood flowing in the vascular bed of the bulbar conjunctiva. We developed software on the LabVIEW platform for automatic data acquisition and interpretation by nonexperts. The device is calibrated by comparing the differential absorbance of light of wavelength 576 and 600 nm with the clinical hemoglobin level of the subject. Our proposed method is consistent with the results obtained using the current gold standard, the automated hematology analyzer. The proposed noncontact optical device for hemoglobin estimation is highly efficient, inexpensive, feasible, and extremely useful in low-resource point-of-care settings. The device output correlates with the different degrees of anemia with absolute and trending accuracy similar to those of widely used invasive methods. Moreover, the device can instantaneously transmit the generated report to a medical expert through e-mail, text messaging, or mobile apps.