Blood-Separating Device Without Energy Source for Implantable Medical Devices

Coagulation of blood inside the implanted medical device is quite a critical problem to limit the lifetime. In this paper, we propose a microfluidic blood separating device using curved and branched channels. It utilizes centrifugal force on curved flow and separates blood flow into blood cell rich and blood cell poor ones at the bifurcation. Though it cannot separate the plasma from blood cells completely, the blood with small concentrations of blood cells will have low coagulatibity and extend the lifetime of the implant medical device. The device does not require any external pumps or valves, i.e., the system does not need any power sources but the blood pressure. We conducted experiments with a titanium foil which contacted to human whole blood with different hematocrit values for 7 days. The device was experimentally characterized with respect to the channel design. The former experiments suggested that lower concentration of blood cells helps avoiding blood coagulations, and the latter showed that the separation by our device is mainly affected by the flow rate and channel curvature.