Design and Optimization of a Novel SPR Sensor for Detecting Cancerous Cells: A Simulation-Based Study

This numerical work uses a surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-based Kretschmann sensor structure to examine early cancer detection. The proposed optical sensor is intended to identify different types of cancer-infected cells in the human body with refractive indices (RIs) between 1.38 and 1.401. It performs well across various RI changes, including biological solutions. The sensor is designed and analyzed using a MATLAB simulation platform based on the transfer matrix method (TMM). Characteristic parameters like sensitivity (S), full width at half maximum (FWHM), detection accuracy (DA), and figure of merit (FoM) are used to assess the suggested SPR sensor’s performance. With a maximum FoM of 166.07 RIU⁻¹ and DA of 0.465°⁻¹, the numerical findings demonstrate that the developed sensor can detect skin, cervical, blood, adrenal gland, and type I and type II breast cancer with a sensitivity of 200, 245.83, 257.14, 303.57, 353.57, and 357.14°/RIU, respectively. Based on the obtained results, we think that the proposed SPR sensor may find use in medical science for early cancer detection, which would open up new possibilities in the biosensing sector.