Grant: Alliance Grants

Following large-scale hazardous radiological/nuclear events, e.g., nuclear power plant incidents, accidental overexposures, and terrorist attacks, it is crucial to obtain individual estimates of absorbed dose of ionizing radiation for triaging and treatment/ monitoring. Biodosimetry is a key technique that provides such estimates based on the detection of biological indicators. The proposed project will develop a new optical technique to determine an individual's level of exposure to ionizing radiation for the purpose of biodosimetry. The method will use blood collected from 50 consenting volunteers following ethics-approved protocols by our project collaborators at Health Canada, along with de-identified personal information such as cell blood count (CBC), sex, age, etc. The de-identified personal information collected for each donor will be used in the data analysis to eliminate the influence of the covariates such as CBC, sex, age, etc., that confound the small radiobiological differences in blood irradiated at different doses. After irradiating the blood ex-vivo with different levels of X-ray exposure, optical measurements (Raman spectroscopy) will be performed on the blood plasma. In this way, high quality and reproducible data sets involving ~150 Raman spectra per irradiated plasma sample per donor will be generated. Machine learning methods will then be applied to this data with the goal of accurately predicting the level of exposure of an unknown blood sample. A compact and portable Raman spectrometer system optimized for blood plasma will be developed in collaboration with our project partner LightMachinery Inc.