High-throughput concentration of rare malignant tumor cells from large-volume effusions by multistage inertial microfluidics

Abstract

On-chip concentration of rare malignant tumor cells (MTCs) in malignant pleural effusions (MPEs) with a large volume is challenging. Previous microfluidic concentrators suffer from a low concentration factor (CF) and...

Inertial microfluidics: current status, challenges, and future opportunities

“…[83][84][85][86] Another strategy involves the coupling of inertial microfluidics with another passive or active manipulation technique; for example, spiral inertial microfluidics has been integrated with a membrane filter, 87 deterministic lateral displacement (DLD), 88,89 and cross-flow filtration. [90][91][92] In the case of the two-stage inertial-DLD (i-DLD) sorter, a high sample purity of 93.59% was achieved for the separation of MCF-7 cells from blood cells. 88 Although DLD has a high separation accuracy, the integrated device cannot eliminate the essence of size-dependent separation and is still unable to separate cells with similar or overlapping sizes.…”

“…114 To deal with rare bioparticles, such as CTCs in peripheral blood that are only 0-50 cells per mL, the efficient isolation and enrichment of these rare cells is a prerequisite for downstream highly sensitive detection. As a highly efficient size-based cell sorter, spiral inertial microfluidics has been widely used for the isolation of CTCs, 12,58,115,116 sperm cells, 117,118 exfoliated tumor cells, 91,[119][120][121] monocytes with internalized pathogens, 122 activated lymphocytes, 123 circulating fetal trophoblasts, 124,125 viral particles, 126 and immune cells 127 from samples of blood, raw semen, pleural effusion, and sputum with complex background cells. After the enrichment of these target cell populations, the separated cells can be rapidly detected by integrating inertial microfluidics with deep-learning-based cell imaging, 128 inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, 129,130 singlecell reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction analysis, 120 ion mobility mass spectrometry, 131 impedancebased microfluidic assay, 132 and genetic genotyping.…”

Next-generation Liquid Biopsy Instruments: Challenges and Opportunities

“…In the future, integrating label-free based cell separation and detection components in the LB instrument would make it possible to achieve this goal. With such LB instruments, CTCs may be isolated based on their physical properties using inertial microfluidic, acoustofluidics, or other technologies [43,44]. Then, isolated CTCs may be detected by label-free interrogation technologies, including impedance cytometry and image flow cytometry [45,46].…”

Generation of dynamic vortices in a microfluidic system incorporating stenosis barrier by tube oscillation

“…Such vortices have been widely used for label-free sorting of cells based on their dimensions. [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17] Vortices can also be generated by implementing sudden expansions or contractions along the microfluidic channel. The size of the vortex is proportional to the Reynolds number and can be large enough to occupy the entire expansion.…”