Microwave Flow Cytometric Detection and Differentiation of Escherichia coli.

Label-free measurement and analysis of single bacterial cells are essential for food safety monitoring and microbial disease diagnosis. We report a microwave flow cytometric sensor with a microstrip sensing device with reduced channel height for bacterial cell measurement. Escherichia coli B and Escherichia coli K-12 were measured with the sensor at frequencies between 500 MHz and 8 GHz. The results show microwave properties of E. coli cells are frequency-dependent. A LightGBM model was developed to classify cell types at a high accuracy of 0.96 at 1 GHz. Thus, the sensor provides a promising label-free method to rapidly detect and differentiate bacterial cells. Nevertheless, the method needs to be further developed by comprehensively measuring different types of cells and demonstrating accurate cell classification with improved machine-learning techniques.

Two-stage radio-frequency interferometer sensors.

We show that simple radio-frequency (RF) interferometers can have slow-wave positive group delay (PGD) or negative group delay (NGD), as well as superluminal propagation (SP) regions, due to a destructive interference process. These properties are easily tunable, which makes RF interferometers unique among systems that have NGD and SP regimes. A two-stage interferometer arrangement, which includes a first stage interferometer in the material-under-test path of a second stage, has significantly improved sensitivity in comparison with a one-stage reference interferometer. With a power divider based first stage and at its maximum NGD frequency, the frequency sensitivity improvement is as high as 7 times. With a quadrature based first stage, the sensitivity is increased by as much as 20 times. Sensitivity improvements are also observed at PGD and SP frequency regions.