A novel micro- and nanofluidic device stacked with magnetic beads has been developed to efficiently trap, concentrate, and retrieve Escherichia coli (E. coli) from the bacterial suspension and pig plasma. The small voids between the magnetic beads are used to physically isolate the bacteria in the device. We used computational fluid dynamics, three-dimensional (3D) tomography technology, and machine learning to probe and explain the bead stacking in a small 3D space with various flow rates. A combination of beads with different sizes is utilized to achieve a high capture efficiency (∼86%) with a flow rate of 50 μL/min. Leveraging the high deformability of this device, an E. coli sample can be retrieved from the designated bacterial suspension by applying a higher flow rate followed by rapid magnetic separation. This unique function is also utilized to concentrate E. coli cells from the original bacterial suspension. An on-chip concentration factor of ∼11× is achieved by inputting 1300 μL of the E. coli sample and then concentrating it in 100 μL of buffer. Importantly, this multiplexed, miniaturized, inexpensive, and transparent device is easy to fabricate and operate, making it ideal for pathogen separation in both laboratory and point-of-care settings.

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Saturation artifacts in optical coherence tomography (OCT) occur when received signal exceeds the dynamic range of spectrometer. Saturation artifact shows a streaking pattern and could impact the quality of OCT images, leading to inaccurate medical diagnosis. In this paper, we automatically localize saturation artifacts and propose an artifact correction method via inpainting. We adopt a dictionary-based sparse representation scheme for inpainting. Experimental results demonstrate that, in both case of synthetic artifacts and real artifacts, our method outperforms interpolation method and Euler’s elastica method in both qualitative and quantitative results. The generic dictionary offers similar image quality when applied to tissue samples which are excluded from dictionary training. This method may have the potential to be widely used in a variety of OCT images for the localization and inpainting of the saturation artifacts.

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Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a cardiovascular condition with high morbidity and mortality. Intravascular optical coherence tomography (IVOCT) has been considered as an optimal imagining system for the diagnosis and treatment of CAD. Constrained by Nyquist theorem, dense sampling in IVOCT attains high resolving power to delineate cellular structures/features. There is a trade-off between high spatial resolution and fast scanning rate for coronary imaging. In this paper, we propose a viable spectral-spatial acquisition method that down-scales the sampling process in both spectral and spatial domain while maintaining high quality in image reconstruction. The down-scaling schedule boosts data acquisition speed without any hardware modifications. Additionally, we propose a unified multi-scale reconstruction framework, namely Multiscale-Spectral-Spatial-Magnification Network (MSSMN), to resolve highly down-scaled (compressed) OCT images with flexible magnification factors. We incorporate the proposed methods into Spectral Domain OCT (SD-OCT) imaging of human coronary samples with clinical features such as stent and calcified lesions. Our experimental results demonstrate that spectral-spatial downscaled data can be better reconstructed than data that is downscaled solely in either spectral or spatial domain. Moreover, we observe better reconstruction performance using MSSMN than using existing reconstruction methods. Our acquisition method and multi-scale reconstruction framework, in combination, may allow faster SD-OCT inspection with high resolution during coronary intervention.

<div>A micro- and nano-fluidic device stacked with magnetic beads is developed to efficiently trap, concentrate, and retrieve Escherichia coli (E. coli) from bacteria suspension</div><div>and pig plasma. The small voids between the magnetic beads are used to physically isolate the bacteria in the device. We use computational fluid dynamics (CFD), 3D</div><div>tomography technology, and machine learning to probe and explain the bead stacking in a small 3D space with various flow rates. A combination of beads with different sizes is utilized to achieve a high capture efficiency of ~86% with a flow rate of 50 μL/min. Leveraging the high deformability of this device, the E. coli sample is retrieved from the designated bacteria suspension by applying a higher flow rate, followed by rapid magnetic separation. This unique function is also utilized to concentrate E. coli from the original bacteria suspension. An on-chip concentration</div><div>factor of ~11× is achieved by inputting 1,300 μL of the E. coli sample and then concentrating it in 100 μL buffer.</div><div>Importantly, this multiplexed, miniaturized, inexpensive, and transparent device is easy to fabricate and operate, making it ideal for pathogen separation in both laboratory and pointof- care (POC) settings.</div>

<div>A micro- and nano-fluidic device stacked with magnetic beads is developed to efficiently trap, concentrate, and retrieve Escherichia coli (E. coli) from bacteria suspension</div><div>and pig plasma. The small voids between the magnetic beads are used to physically isolate the bacteria in the device. We use computational fluid dynamics (CFD), 3D</div><div>tomography technology, and machine learning to probe and explain the bead stacking in a small 3D space with various flow rates. A combination of beads with different sizes is utilized to achieve a high capture efficiency of ~86% with a flow rate of 50 μL/min. Leveraging the high deformability of this device, the E. coli sample is retrieved from the designated bacteria suspension by applying a higher flow rate, followed by rapid magnetic separation. This unique function is also utilized to concentrate E. coli from the original bacteria suspension. An on-chip concentration</div><div>factor of ~11× is achieved by inputting 1,300 μL of the E. coli sample and then concentrating it in 100 μL buffer.</div><div>Importantly, this multiplexed, miniaturized, inexpensive, and transparent device is easy to fabricate and operate, making it ideal for pathogen separation in both laboratory and pointof- care (POC) settings.</div>