Defect-rich CoOOH nanorings: A biocompatible and cost-efficient material for clinical diagnosis of children heart failure

Nanomaterials have been widely used in the detection of biomarkers, but only a few of them can be really applied in clinical disease diagnosis in hospital. Herein, we fabricate a kind of defect-rich CoOOH nanorings (NRs) and employ them as probes to improve the clinical diagnosis performance for children heart failure (HF). This diagnosis platform is dependent on ultrasensitive and specific detection of the “gold standard biomarker” of HF, B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP), which is realized based on the prevention of fluorescence resonance energy transfer. The detection range for BNP is 30–800 fg/mL with a limit of detection as low as 30 fg/mL. For diagnosis of a large number of clinical cases of children who behave sign or symptom of HF (respiratory distress, edema, or tachycardia), a very close correlation (r = 0.990) is obtained between this method and commercially available chemiluminescence immunoassay (CLIA, Siemens) that commonly adopted by hospital. It is worth noting that the present method has better diagnostic performance for children HF than CLIA including specificity (84.6% vs 61.5%), accuracy (82.2% vs 66.7%) and positive predictive value (40.0% vs 20.0%). Moreover, this method is more cost-effective than CLIA for BNP detection. The defect-rich, biocompatible, and low-cost CoOOH nanomaterial is promising to be applied in early clinical diagnosis of HF in hospital.