Three-dimensional particle tracking in microfluidic channel flow using in and out of focus diffraction

Tasadduq, Bushra; Wang, Gonghao; Banani, Mohamed El; Mao, Wenbin; Lam, Wilbur A.; Alexeev, Alexander; Sulchek, Todd

doi:10.1016/j.flowmeasinst.2015.06.018

Cited by 9 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Microfluidic applications are continuing to expand in the fields of nanotechnology, manufacturing and life sciences, and therefore, there is a pressing need for methods to characterize fluid behaviour at the microscale and suspended particle motion (Williams et al 2010;Winer et al 2014;Tasadduq et al 2015). As an example, detecting cross-sectional position of flowing particles is essential in the investigation of self-ordering mechanisms (Gao et al 2017), inertial particle focusing (Di Carlo 2009) or active particle focusing [e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Electrical measurement of cross-sectional position of particles flowing through a microchannel

Reale

Ninno

Businaro

et al. 2018

Microfluid Nanofluid

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The first high-throughput system for the electrical detection of cross-sectional position and velocity of individual particles flowing through a rectangular microchannel is presented. Lateral position (along channel width) and vertical position (along channel height) are measured using two different sets of coplanar electrodes. In particular, the ratio of travel times measured with electrodes generating a current flow transverse or oblique with respect to particle trajectory yields lateral position. The relative prominence and transit time of a bipolar double-Gaussian signal obtained with a suited electrode configuration, respectively, supply vertical position and velocity. The operating principle is presented by means of finite element numerical simulations. The method is experimentally validated by comparing the electrical estimates of position and velocity of polystyrene beads with optical estimates obtained by processing high-speed images. The system is used to observe bead focusing at different particle Reynolds numbers. This system, providing a fully electrical characterization of single-particle motion, represents a powerful tool, e.g. to understand fluid motion at the microscale, in particle separation studies, or to assess the performance of particle focusing devices. Moreover, it can be simultaneously used to perform single-cell impedance spectroscopy, thus achieving an unprecedented multiparamteric characterization.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For many applications (e.g. micromixers or particle focusing devices), visualization of motion in the third dimension is required to fully understand the trajectory of particles (Tasadduq et al 2015). To that aim, multi-camera (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electrical measurement of cross-sectional position of particles flowing through a microchannel

Reale

Ninno

Businaro

et al. 2018

Microfluid Nanofluid

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“…2a and b and experimental data in Fig. 2c,d reveal that microparticles with different sizes separate laterally as they flow in the ridged microchannel, using the separation device with 8 µm gap size to pairwise study the behavior of 7 µm and 4 µm particles 42 , 46 , 47 . We demonstrate that there exists a z-position dependent phenomenon which leads to dispersity of smaller particle trajectories.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 95%

“…The height-dependent secondary flows then cause particles with different sizes to migrate transversely with unique trajectories. We use a novel 3D imaging approach 46 , 47 to demonstrate that variability of vertical position affects particle trajectories in a manner detrimental to accurate particle sorting. By incorporating z-axis (vertical direction or channel height is along z-axis) focusing of the sample inlet so as to position all particles to the bottom of the channel, we optimize particle exposure to transverse flow fields for size-dependent sorting.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enhancing size based size separation through vertical focus microfluidics using secondary flow in a ridged microchannel

Tasadduq

Lam

Alexeev

et al. 2017

Sci Rep

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High throughput size based separation and sorting of bioparticles and cells is critical to a variety of biomedical processing steps for medical diagnostics and pharmaceutical purification. Improving microfluidic size-based particle/cell sorting is a challenge to better address the need for generating more homogeneous subpopulations for study and use. We propose a novel advance to microfluidic sorting devices that uses three-dimensional focusing of the sample to optimally position particles to amplify the size-dependent differences in trajectories caused by differential secondary flows. The result is an increase in the purity of small particles by 35- fold and large particles by 8-fold in comparison to unfocused flow. Our simulated and experimental data reveal for the first time that positioning particles in three-dimensional space can be used to better leverage the differential lateral movement of particles with different sizes as they flow in microchannel with transverse secondary flows. The focusing approach may also be useful to improve positioning of particles with inertial channels with multiple equilibrium positions. This technique performs continuous-flow, high throughput size based sorting of millions of particles and cells in a minute without any pre and post-processing. We have also demonstrated improved enrichment and recovery of white blood cells from human blood.

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“…Whereas measuring cellular mechanical properties by AFM is a low-throughput process (~3 min/cell), microfluidics promises to provide a high-throughput method that combines stiffness-, size-, and viscoelasticity-based sorting to isolate stem-like cells (34)(35)(36)(54)(55)(56). Such high-throughput techniques can be used to generate corneal tissue implants with highly enriched stem-like limbal cell populations, which may yield superior clinical outcomes compared with tissue implants that are directly harvested from the cornea (8).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cellular Stiffness as a Novel Stemness Marker in the Corneal Limbus

Bongiorno

Chojnowski

Lauderdale

et al. 2016

Biophysical Journal

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Healthy eyes contain a population of limbal stem cells (LSCs) that continuously renew the corneal epithelium. However, each year, 1 million Americans are afflicted with severely reduced visual acuity caused by corneal damage or disease, including LSC deficiency (LSCD). Recent advances in corneal transplant technology promise to repair the cornea by implanting healthy LSCs to encourage regeneration; however, success is limited to transplanted tissues that contain a sufficiently high percentage of LSCs. Attempts to screen limbal tissues for suitable implants using molecular stemness markers are confounded by the poorly understood signature of the LSC phenotype. For cells derived from the corneal limbus, we show that the performance of cell stiffness as a stemness indicator is on par with the performance of DNP63a, a common molecular marker. In combination with recent methods for sorting cells on a biophysical basis, the biomechanical stemness markers presented here may enable the rapid purification of LSCs from a heterogeneous population of corneal cells, thus potentially enabling clinicians and researchers to generate corneal transplants with sufficiently high fractions of LSCs, regardless of the LSC percentage in the donor tissue.

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Three-dimensional particle tracking in microfluidic channel flow using in and out of focus diffraction

Cited by 9 publications

References 14 publications

Electrical measurement of cross-sectional position of particles flowing through a microchannel

Electrical measurement of cross-sectional position of particles flowing through a microchannel

Enhancing size based size separation through vertical focus microfluidics using secondary flow in a ridged microchannel

Cellular Stiffness as a Novel Stemness Marker in the Corneal Limbus

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