A fidget spinner for the point-of-care diagnosis of urinary tract infection

The point-of-care detection of pathogens in biological samples in resource-limited settings should be inexpensive, rapid, portable, simple and accurate. Here, we describe a custom-made

fidget spinner that rapidly concentrates pathogens in 1-ml samples of undiluted urine by more than 100-fold for the on-device colorimetric detection of bacterial load and pathogen

identification. In Tiruchirappalli, India, the device enabled the on-site detection of infection with the naked eye within 50 min in urine samples from 39 patients suspected of having a

urinary tract infection. We also show that, in 30 clinical samples of urinary tract infection, the device can be used to perform an antimicrobial susceptibility test for the antimicrobial

drugs ciprofloxacin and cefazolin within 120 min. The fidget spinner could be used in low-resource settings as an inexpensive handheld point-of-care device for the rapid concentration and

detection of pathogens in urine samples.

The main data supporting the findings in this study are available within the paper and its Supplementary information. The raw and analysed datasets are too numerous to be readily shared

publicly but are available for research purposes from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

The custom Matlab code for data analysis is provided at https://github.com/yoonkyoungcho/Fidget.

We thank S. Manivanan for his support in the clinical sample testing. We thank J. Oh for discussions about the modelling. This work is supported by a grant from the Institute for Basic

Science of Korea (grant no. IBS-R020-D1) and the Korean Health Technology R&D Project of the Ministry of Health and Welfare (grant no. HI12C1845).

These authors contributed equally: Issac Michael, Dongyoung Kim.

Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Life Sciences, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), Ulsan, Republic of Korea

Issac Michael, Oleksandra Gulenko, Dong Yeob Ki & Yoon-Kyoung Cho

Center for Soft and Living Matter, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Ulsan, Republic of Korea

Issac Michael, Dongyoung Kim, Sumit Kumar, Juhee Park & Yoon-Kyoung Cho

Department of Transdisciplinary Studies, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Institutes of Entrepreneurial BioConvergence, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

BK21+ Creative Research Engineer Development for IT, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

Department of Laboratory Medicine, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Biomedical Research Institute, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Quantamatrix Inc., Medical Innovation Center, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea

I.M., D.K. and Y.-K.C. conceived and designed the research. I.M., D.K., O.G., Sumit K., J.C., Saravana K., D.Y.K., J.P., H.Y.J. and T.S.K. performed the research. I.M., D.K., O.G., H.Y.J.,

S.Kwon and Y.-K.C. wrote the manuscript.

I.M., D.K., D.Y.K. and Y.-K.C. are inventors of a patent (10-2103784, Korea). Y.-K.C. is an inventor of a filed patent (14/780,002, USA). All other authors declare no competing interests.

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Supplementary notes, figures, tables, references and video captions.

Commercial fidget spinner (left) and Dx-FS (right), operated by a user.

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