Deterministic Lateral Displacement (DLD) Analysis Tool Utilizing Machine Learning towards High-Throughput Separation

Deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) is a microfluidic method for the continuous separation of particles based on their size. There is growing interest in using DLD for harvesting circulating tumor cells from blood for further assays due to its low cost and robustness. While DLD is a powerful tool and development of high-throughput DLD separation devices holds great promise in cancer diagnostics and therapeutics, much of the experimental data analysis in DLD research still relies on error-prone and time-consuming manual processes. There is a strong need to automate data analysis in microfluidic devices to reduce human errors and the manual processing time. In this work, a reliable particle detection method is developed as the basis for the DLD separation analysis. Python and its available packages are used for machine vision techniques, along with existing identification methods and machine learning models. Three machine learning techniques are implemented and compared in the determination of the DLD separation mode. The program provides a significant reduction in video analysis time in DLD separation, achieving an overall particle detection accuracy of 97.86% with an average computation time of 25.274 s.