Microfluidic devices for continuous blood plasma separation and analysis during pediatric cardiopulmonary bypass procedures

As an extension of previous work, a microfluidic device, which can separate blood plasma in a continuous, real-time fashion from a whole blood, is successfully integrated with a mock cardiopulmonary bypass circuit. The functionality of the device is demonstrated with the use of freshly harvested bovine blood. The plasma selectivities were 100% and 99.4% and the plasma separation volume percents were 18.7% and 24.5% for 26% and 37% inlet hematocrit levels, respectively. As an advanced stage of this research, a microfluidic device, which can measure the concentration of clinically relevant blood plasma protein in a continuous fashion, is being developed on the basis of fluid handling circuits coupled to fluorescent cytometric bead assays. The functionality of the device is demonstrated with the use of a biotinylated FITC solution and a streptavidin-coated, 8-μm-diameter bead. The binding event between biotinylated FITC and the streptavidin bead is continuously detected within a detection window at the outlet of the device. For a known concentration (1 μg/ml) of biotinylated FITC solution, the measured fluorescent intensity is fairly constant and shows a stable gaussian distribution of the bead fluorescence intensity. It is expected that the proposed device can be used for continuous measurement of clinically relevant proteins during cardiac surgery with the cardiopulmonary bypass procedure.