Detection, Imaging, and Quantification of DNA-Based Pathogen Based on Inkjet-Printed Test Strips

It is known that the foodborne pathogen E.coli O157:H7 from contaminated food can cause severe disease in our bodies and even death. Therefore, the detection of foodborne pathogens in our daily diet is crucial for global public health. We have previously reported an affordable, rapid, and simple method for detecting E.coli O157:H7 that uses inkjet patterning to create functionalized biosensing test strips detecting the target organism down to 102 CFU/ml. In this paper, we focus on optimizing the response variations of our biosensors for detecting the same concentration of the target in two aspects: the comparison of various image segmentation methods and the optimization of the number of print layers.