High-throughput blood cell focusing and plasma isolation using spiral inertial microfluidic devices

Herein, we explored the blood cell focusing and plasma isolation using a spiral inertial microfluidic device. First, the flow-rate and concentration effects on the migration dynamics of blood cells were systematically investigated to uncover the focusing mechanisms and steric crowding effects of cells in Dean-coupled inertial flows. A novel phenomenon that the focusing status of discoid red blood cells (RBCs) changes according to the channel height was discovered. These experimental data may provide valuable insights for the high-throughput processing of blood samples using inertial microfluidics. On the basis of the improved understandings on blood cell focusing, efficient isolation of plasma from whole blood with a 20-fold dilution was achieved at a throughput up to 700 μl/min. The purity of the isolated blood plasma was close to 100 %, and the plasma yield was calculated to be 38.5 %. As compared with previously-reported devices, our spiral inertial microfluidic device provides a balanced overall performance, and has overriding advantages in terms of processing throughput and operating efficiency.