A novel Plasma Medicine tool for accelerated haemostasis

We present the main features of a 3-years Research Project on Plasma Medicine that has started at the beginning of 2017. The project is being carried out as International collaboration between the Department of Surgical and Medical Sciences of University of Catanzaro (Italy - hosting institution), Consorzio RFX (Italy) and the AIST Association (Japan). The main focus of the project is the development of a non-thermal plasma source for accelerating blood coagulation. A first prototype has been developed and tested and the main technical characteristics are summarized in this contribution. The plasma source is based on a Dielectric Barrier Discharge (DBD) that can use either Helium (as shown in fig.1) or Argon as working gas. The device is controlled by a microcontroller and can be supplied by a standard 220 V/50 Hz AC voltage. An AC/DC converter is then used to feed high voltage transformer to 8-9 kV discharge. Effective current on a metallic target measurements and emission spectroscopy analysis are presented. The presence in the plasma of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS and RONS) is highlighted in the different operational regimes. Effective current to target is of the order of 1 mA. Preliminary tests on blood samples exposed to the helium plasma (for about 30-40 s) shows a coagulation time reduction of about 15% with respect to the untreated samples. Fig.1: Helium plasma plume produced by applying a 6 kV voltage between the electrodes at a frequency of 5 kHz and with a gas flow rate of 2 l/min.