Rapid diagnosis plays a vital role in daily life, and is effective in reducing treatment costs and increasing curability, especially in remote areas with limited availability of resources. Among the...

In recent years, point-of-care testing has played an important role in immunoassay, biochemical analysis, and molecular diagnosis, especially in low-resource settings. Among various point-of-care-testing platforms, microfluidic chips have many outstanding advantages. Microfluidic chip applies the technology of miniaturizing conventional laboratory which enables the whole biochemical process including reagent loading, reaction, separation, and detection on the microchip. As a result, microfluidic platform has become a hotspot of research in the fields of food safety, health care, and environmental monitoring in the past few decades. Here, the state-of-the-art application of microfluidics in immunoassay in the past decade will be reviewed. According to different driving forces of fluid, microfluidic platform is divided into two parts: passive manipulation and active manipulation. In passive manipulation, we focus on the capillary-driven microfluidics, while in active manipulation, we introduce pressure microfluidics, centrifugal microfluidics, electric microfluidics, optofluidics, magnetic microfluidics, and digital microfluidics. Additionally, within the introduction of each platform, innovation of the methods used and their corresponding performance improvement will be discussed. Ultimately, the shortcomings of different platforms and approaches for improvement will be proposed.

The band interleaved data acquisition system (BI-DAS) is an attractive structure to improve the bandwidth of the acquisition system. However, the non-ideal characteristic of the spectrum analysis filter in BI-DAS results in an overlapping frequency band between two adjacent frequency sub-bands. Phase misalignment (PM) between two sub-bands in the overlapping band may cause those signals canceled or partially canceled to each other when sub-bands' signal are merged. In this paper, a compensation module with a digital all-pass filter (APF) is proposed for the PM of the overlapping bands in BI-DASs. Based on this compensation module, a hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm, along with the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) algorithm is proposed to design coefficients of the compensation module. The compensation module and corresponding method proposed in this paper are verified in a BI-DAS with 20Gsps sampling rate and 5.5GHz bandwidth. The experimental results show that the proposed compensation module can effectively compensate the PM between the sub-bands in the overlapping band. The proposed hybrid PSO-LM (HPSOLM) algorithm combines the flexibility and reliability inherent in the PSO with the fast convergence and precision of the LM algorithm. It can effectively design the compensation module with stable APF while consuming less time and obtaining better compensation results than the conventional PSO method. INDEX TERMS band interleaved data acquisition system, overlapping band, phase compensation, digital all-pass filters, hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm, Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm I. INTRODUCTION

As the medical community puts forward higher requirements for the speed and convenience of disease diagnosis, point-of-care testing has become a hot research topic to overcome various kinds of healthcare problems. Blood test is considered to be highly sensitive and accurate in clinical diagnosis. However, conventional plasma separation system tends to be bulky and needs professional operations. Moreover, imprecise separation may cause residual biochemical substances such as blood cells to affect the detection results. In this work, to solve these problems, we designed a portable centrifugal microfluidic platform for automatic, rapid and ultraprecise blood separation. The disc consists of multichambers and multi-microchannels where a plasma reservoir and a cell reservoir are connected to each other and collinear with the center of the circle. This structure overcomes the weakness of low separation efficiency (when hematocrit increases) under the traditional blood separation structure (bifurcation structure). As a result, the proposed system achieved 99.9% plasma purity, 99.9% separation efficiency (with a blood hematocrit of 48%) and 32.5% plasma recovery rate in the 50s, which provides a strong guarantee for rapid blood diagnosis and analysis, especially in areas where medical resources are limited.

The time-interleaved (TI) structure has been widely implemented in high speed, wideband data acquisition systems to increase the system sampling rate. However, the frequency responses of each sub-sampling path are not identical. This is named frequency response mismatches (FRMs). In TI-based printed circuit board level systems, due to the impact of the parasitic parameters, the FRMs are more complicated than the mismatches in TI analog-to-digital converters (TIADCs), which degrade the system performance severely. Therefore, the FRM calibration in 2-channel TI acquisition systems with two features is researched. The first one is that the TI system has a larger mismatch range than in most previous research. The second one is that the channel frequency response uses the general model. The calibration structure is established by the analysis of the digital TI model, which implements the TI operation in the digital domain to reconstruct the mismatches in the time domain. Furthermore, the problem of designing an arbitrary frequency response filter is transformed to the question of designing a three-stage cascaded filter group, which gives a method to realize the arbitrary frequency response in a real system. An oscilloscope prototype is proposed to verify the calibration performance. The simulation and experiment show the following: (i) Even though it uses the general frequency response and the FRMs are significant, the proposed method is still effective. (ii) The mismatch range of magnitude and phase responses is highly suppressed, and the spurious-free dynamic range is improved by 16.26 dB after calibration of the prototype.