How IIT Roorkee Developed Sensor To Detect Schizophrenia & Parkinson’s At An Early Stage

New Delhi: A team of IIT Roorkee scientists has developed a dopamine sensor to detect neurological diseases like schizophrenia and Parkinson’s at an early stage. The findings were recently published in the prestigious Nature Scientific Reports.

How does it work?

The level of a chemical called dopamine changes in the brain and the sensor works by measuring the dopamine levels when a person suffers from these diseases. It can detect even a small change in the level of this chemical in the brain thus detecting the possibility of neurological disorders like schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease, according to a report in India Today.

Early detection is important because……

These diseases cannot be completely cured, so early detection helps in controlling their advancement.  This is where the sensor developed at IIT Roorkee can play a significant role in the medical field.

Prof. Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee, said, “I would like to congratulate the research team for working on such an important problem and contributing towards the diagnosis of mental illnesses which affect a large fraction of our population.”

This is how the sensor was created

The IIT Roorkee team used a material called graphene quantum dot which was mixed with sulfur and boron for fabricating these sensors.

In the presence of a very small amount of dopamine, this sensor changes light intensity which can be easily measured, thus providing an estimate of the amount of dopamine in the brain, the publication reported.