Two dimensional barcode-inspired automatic analysis for arrayed microfluidic immunoassays

The usability of many high-throughput lab-on-a-chip devices in point-of-care applications is currently limited by the manual data acquisition and analysis process, which are labor intensive and time consuming. Based on our original design in the biochemical reactions, we proposed here a universal approach to perform automatic, fast, and robust analysis for high-throughput array-based microfluidic immunoassays. Inspired by two-dimensional (2D) barcodes, we incorporated asymmetric function patterns into a microfluidic array. These function patterns provide quantitative information on the characteristic dimensions of the microfluidic array, as well as mark its orientation and origin of coordinates. We used a computer program to perform automatic analysis for a high-throughput antigen/antibody interaction experiment in 10 s, which was more than 500 times faster than conventional manual processing. Our method is broadly applicable to many other microchannel-based immunoassays.