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

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 R...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Lab on a chip 2020-10, Vol.2 (21), p.393-3937
Main Authors: Namgung, Bumseok, Lee, Taewoo, Tan, Justin Kok Soon, Poh, Daren Kiat How, Park, Soyeon, Chng, Kevin Ziyang, Agrawal, Rupesh, Park, Sung-Yong, Leo, Hwa Liang, Kim, Sangho
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agglomeration
Blood
CMOS
Correlation coefficients
Design optimization
Erythrocytes
Flow resistance
Fluid dynamics
Fluid flow
Light emitting diodes
Light sources
Light transmittance
Low cost
Measurement methods
Shear flow
Time dependence
Vibration
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Summary: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 (
ISSN:1473-0197
1473-0189
DOI:10.1039/d0lc00619j