An Integrated Microoptical Microfluidic Device for Agglutination Detection and Blood Typing
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Date
2007-07-31
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Abstract
Blood type identification is an important requirement for many medical procedures, especially blood transfusions. Currently, medical professionals have several ways for determining a person's blood type; however the potential for human error is a factor in all these ways. No automated process exists that takes this human error out of the equation without great expense. The accuracy of testing methods used on a large scale relies heavily upon the experience of the technician performing the test.
Pervious work performed at NC State University in this area made use of the light-scattering properties of particles with a macoscopic sample. The device described in this paper uses a much smaller sample and overall can be miniaturized significantly.
The focus is a microfluidic device that is able to detect blood type compatibility. It specifically does this by identifying agglutinated blood cells vs. free non‐agglutinated blood cells. The fluid portion of the apparatus is a polymer based two dimensional microfluidic device. It provides channels for the fluid flow but also holds and very accurately aligns two fiber optic cables that are used for agglutination detection. In short the device has a fluid channel perpendicular to two fiber optic cables. The fluid, a blood/saline mixture, flows in between the two cables. When a red blood cell passes across the beam of light some amount of the light is absorbed by the cell and some it is scattered, the rest continues on to the receiver fiber. When an agglutinated cell passes through the gap between the fibers more of the light is absorbed and scattered than as with the individual cell. This larger reduction in amplitude of light transmitted to the receiver fiber is indicative of red blood cell agglutination and is ultimately how the device determines blood type compatibility. Another way to setup the device makes use of Mie light scattering to detect agglutination.
This device is solely a research piece of equipment in its current configuration but has very appealing qualities that would allow it to easily be scaled down into a microelectromechanical system (MEMS) device. From the results obtained one can clearly see that the device is able to detect an agglutinated sample vs. a non agglutinated sample.
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Keywords
Blood Typing, Fiber Optics, Agglutination, Blood, Microfluidic, Transfusion
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Degree
MS
Discipline
Mechanical Engineering
