Early adequate sepsis therapy using ion mobility spectrometry based diagnostics

Aim of this project is the development of an innovative method for rapid pathogen identification of sepsis patients by headspace analysis of standard blood cultures using gas chromatography ion mobility spectrometry (GC-IMS). In contrast to the current care situation this method should lead to a result after a few hours, while the analysis itself only takes a few minutes. For this purpose, we develop a dual polarity IMS with a non-radioactive ionization source being able to detect positive and negative ions simultaneously. This allows the analysis of both ion polarities with just a single GC run.