An Intelligent Low-Power Low-Cost Mobile Lab-On-Chip Yeast Cell Culture Platform

Abstract

Cells are the fundamental unit of life activities, and the basis of studying life phenomena. It is very important to observe the growth state of yeast cells for exploring the law of life movement, diagnosis and treatment of diseases, drug screening and so on. This study proposes a kind of intelligent low-cost portable cell culture platform using the microfluidic channel and the special machine learning circuit. The platform can independently complete the whole work of living cell culture and monitoring. For realizing the reusable and low-power deep learning circuit, a complement optimization neural network algorithm for hardware optimization and corresponding multi-clock-domain reusable multi-level precision neural network accelerator circuit were proposed, which can reduce the circuit area and power of convolution operation in all precisions by average 18.11% and 23.5% respectively. Besides, a dynamic multi-level precision control method based on the battery level is proposed to dynamically adjust the precision of machine learning operation, in order to balance the working time and segmentation accuracy of the culture platform. In addition, a microcolumns-based three-port input microfluidic structure was designed for better yeast culture effect. The experiment showed that the culture platform can realize yeast cell culture and achieve almost the same segmentation accuracy as the large biological laboratory with low-power and low-cost. Compared with the previous work, the cost of mass production was reduced by 88.95%, and the equipment volume was 27.1% smaller. At the same time, it can achieve the best balance of working time and working accuracy under the condition of limited power of equipment according to the needs of users. INDEX TERMS Microfluidic channel, yeast culture, portable cell culture platform, intelligent, low-power, lab-on-chip.

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