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Published February 2011 | public
Journal Article

Microfluidic blood filtration device

Abstract

Rapid decentralized biomedical diagnostics have become increasingly necessary in a medical environment of growing costs and mounting demands on healthcare personnel and infrastructure. Such diagnostics require low-cost novel devices that can operate at bedside or in doctor offices using small amounts of sample that can be extracted and processed on the spot. Thus, point-of-care sample preparation is an important component of the necessary diagnostic paradigm shift. We therefore introduce a microfluidic device which produces plasma from whole blood. The device is inexpensive, reliable, easy to fabricate, and requires only 3.5 kPa pressure to operate. The device is fully compatible with microfluidic diagnostic chips. The output 23-gauge microtube of the former can be directly plugged into the input ports of the latter allowing immediate applicability in practice as a sample-prep prestage to a variety of emergent microfluidic diagnostic devices. In addition, the shown approach of filter encapsulation in elastomer has principle importance as it is compatible with and applicable to microfluidic sampleprep integration with analytical stages within the same elastomeric chip. This can eventually lead to finger-prick blood tests in point-of-care settings.

Additional Information

© 2010 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC. Published online: 30 October 2010. The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Boeing Corporation under the SRDMA program, and from the National Institutes of Health under R01HG002644, 1K99007151, and 4R00EB007151-03.

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
March 5, 2024