title: High-throughput blood cell focusing and plasma isolation using spiral inertial microfluidic devices.
abstract: Herein, we explored the blood cell focusing and plasma isolation using a spiral inertial microfluidic device. First, the flow-rate and concentration effects on the migration dynamics of blood cells were systematically investigated to uncover the focusing mechanisms and steric crowding effects of cells in Dean-coupled inertial flows. A novel phenomenon that the focusing status of discoid red blood cells (RBCs) changes according to the channel height was discovered. These experimental data may provide valuable insights for the high-throughput processing of blood samples using inertial microfluidics. On the basis of the improved understandings on blood cell focusing, efficient isolation of plasma from whole blood with a 20-fold dilution was achieved at a throughput up to 700 μl/min. The purity of the isolated blood plasma was close to 100 %, and the plasma yield was calculated to be 38.5 %. As compared with previously-reported devices, our spiral inertial microfluidic device provides a balanced overall performance, and has overriding advantages in terms of processing throughput and operating efficiency.
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical Engineering, and Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Design and Manufacture of Micro-Nano Biomedical Instruments, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211189, China. nan.xiang@seu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Nan
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Xiang
authors.affiliation: School of Mechanical Engineering, and Jiangsu Key Laboratory for Design and Manufacture of Micro-Nano Biomedical Instruments, Southeast University, Nanjing, 211189, China. nzh2003@seu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Zhonghua
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Ni
mesh_terms: D002469:Cell Separation / Q000295:instrumentation; D004867:Equipment Design; D004912:Erythrocytes / Q000166:cytology*; D006801:Humans; D046210:Microfluidic Analytical Techniques / Q000379:methods*; D044085:Microfluidics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D010949:Plasma / Q000737:chemistry*
keywords: Blood cell focusing; High-throughput processing; Inertial microfluidics; Migration dynamics; Plasma isolation