An insect brain-based bioelectronic neural sensor for the systemic detection and precise classification of endometriosis

Abstract

Endometriosis is a chronic inflammatory disease with limited screening options and a recognized diagnostic delay. To investigate detection potentialities, a bioelectronic sensor is realized to detect endometriotic vs endometrial models via their emitted volatile organic compounds (VOCs) by leveraging an insect olfactory system combined with computational analytical techniques for classification. Our analyses of cell culture headspace-evoked neural responses show that our sensor can distinguish multiple cell lines by their scent (i.e., emitted VOC mixture). By combining neural responses across experiments, we obtained high-dimensional population neural response templates that were used to classify unknown samples with a high accuracy. We obtained an accuracy of 89% in differentiating 4 cell lines at two growth timepoints (24 hr. and 72 hr.) and obtained an accuracy of 88% in classifying epithelial co-cultures of endometriotic and endometrial cell lines cultured at 0%, 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% in ascending/descending ratios. Our results support the hypothesis that endometriosis is detectable via the metabolic differences found in the emitted gas mixtures or scent from various cell lines and demonstrates the effectiveness of our sensor in distinguishing the subtle changes in endometriotic vs endometrial models pertaining to durations in growth and co-cultures.