Multispectral optical sensor for assessing skin's molecular response to induced psychological stress

The skin is a source of biomarkers of several psychiatric conditions. Here, we aim to individuate stress-related skin response with a high-throughput multimodal combination of optical techniques. The cognitive-emotional stress was induced in healthy volunteers with the Montreal Imaging Stress Task. Raman, reflectance, and fluorescence spectra were recorded on their palm before and after stress induction using a multimodal fiber-probe sensor developed by our group. Electrodermal activity was registered throughout the experiment to monitor the psychological stress. A multimodal approach demonstrated 100% accuracy in classifying "no-stress" and "stress" conditions. Several Raman shifts were identified following stress induction. We develop a database of Raman, diffusive reflectance, and fluorescence spectra, as well as fluorescence lifetime properties of stress-responsive molecules to perform to extract single-molecule spectra from the total Raman spectra collected from volunteers’s skin. The preliminary results confirm the potential in application of our multispectral optical sensor for non-invasive detection of psychological stress and psychiatric disease conditions.