Issue 21, 2020

Vibration motor-integrated low-cost, miniaturized system for rapid quantification of red blood cell aggregation

Abstract

Human red blood cells (RBCs) aggregate under low shear conditions, which significantly modulates flow resistance and tissue perfusion. A higher aggregation tendency in blood thus serves as an important clinical indicator for the screening of cardiovascular disorders. Conventional ways of measuring RBC aggregation still require large sample volumes, cumbersome manual procedures, and expensive benchtop systems. These inconvenient and high-cost measurement methods hamper their clinical applicability. Here, we propose a low-cost, miniaturized system to overcome the limitations of these methods. Our system utilizes a coin vibration motor (CVM) to generate a localized vortex for disaggregating RBCs in a disposable fluidic chip. The design of the chip was optimized with fluid dynamics simulations to ensure sufficient shear flow in the localized vortex for RBC disaggregation. The time-dependent increase in light transmittance from an LED light source through the plasma gap while the RBCs re-aggregate is captured with a CMOS camera under stasis conditions to quantify the level of RBC aggregation. Our CVM-based aggregometer was validated against a commercial benchtop system for human blood samples under physiological and pathological conditions, and showed an excellent performance with a high intraclass correlation coefficient of 0.995. In addition, we were able to achieve a rapid measurement (<4 min) with the CVM-based aggregometer, requiring only a 6 μl blood sample. These illustrate the potential of our CVM-based aggregometer for low-cost point-of-care diagnostics without compromising the measurement sensitivity.

Graphical abstract: Vibration motor-integrated low-cost, miniaturized system for rapid quantification of red blood cell aggregation

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Paper
Submitted
16 ဇွန် 2020
Accepted
17 စက် 2020
First published
18 စက် 2020

Lab Chip, 2020,20, 3930-3937

Vibration motor-integrated low-cost, miniaturized system for rapid quantification of red blood cell aggregation

B. Namgung, T. Lee, J. K. S. Tan, D. K. H. Poh, S. Park, K. Z. Chng, R. Agrawal, S. Park, H. L. Leo and S. Kim, Lab Chip, 2020, 20, 3930 DOI: 10.1039/D0LC00619J

To request permission to reproduce material from this article, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements