title: Lab-on-CD microfluidic platform for rapid separation and mixing of plasma from whole blood.
abstract: Traditional clinical methods for separating whole blood into blood cells and cell-free plasma are labor intensive and time consuming. Accordingly, the present study proposes a simple compact disk (CD) microfluidic platform for the rapid separation of plasma from whole human blood and the subsequent mixing of the plasma with a suitable reagent. The performance of three CD microfluidic platforms incorporating square-wave mixing channels with different widths is evaluated both numerically and experimentally. The results show that given an appropriate specification of the microchannel geometry and a CD rotation speed of 2000 rpm, a separation efficiency of 95 % can be achieved within 5 ~ 6 s given a diluted blood sample with a hematocrit concentration of 6 %. Moreover, a mixing efficiency of more than 96 % can be obtained within 5 s given a CD rotation speed of 2200 rpm. The practical feasibility of the proposed device is demonstrated by performing a prothrombin time (PT) test. It is shown that while the time required to perform the PT test using a conventional bench top system is around 15 min, the proposed CD microfluidic platform allows the test to be completed within 1 min.
authors.affiliation: Department of Automation Engineering, National Formosa University, No. 64, Wenhua Rd., Huwei, Yunlin, 632, Taiwan, junan@nfu.edu.tw.
authors.forename: Ju-Nan
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Kuo
authors.forename: Bo-Shiun
authors.initials: BS
authors.lastname: Li
mesh_terms: D004867:Equipment Design; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D006400:Hematocrit; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D046210:Microfluidic Analytical Techniques / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods*; D044085:Microfluidics / Q000295:instrumentation / Q000379:methods; D010949:Plasma / Q000737:chemistry*