Highly Efficient and Rapid Surface-Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy Active Platform Based on Au Nanorods for Ultrasensitive Traumatic Brain Injury Detection

Traumatic brain injury (TBI), serving as a global health problem, is the primary cause of death and disability. However, the lack of a simple, accurate, and rapid method to diagnose and distinguish the injury severity of TBI in the acute phase and further improve the prognosis has been plaguing clinicians. To solve this problem, a highly sensitive surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) sensor, which was based on gold nanorod (AuNR) arrays, has been designed for the quantitative determination of TBI biomarkers. To create this effective SERS sensor, the AuNRs were fabricated via optimizing the particle morphology and, by evaporative self-assembly, optimizing AuNRs were assembled on microsilicon wafers to form AuNR array platforms with an enhancement factor of 1.24 × 106 and a limit of detection reaching 10–2 fg·mL–1. The ideal SERS sensors were further proven to have excellent sensitivity and reliability after being employed to analyze the various levels of S100β and IL-10 both in animal model blood samples and human blood samples. All results revealed that our biosensors can be a promising strategy for point-of-care clinical diagnosis and TBI severity distinction.