Single-step centrifugal hematocrit determination on a 10-$ processing device

Biomed Microdevices. 2007 Dec;9(6):795-9. doi: 10.1007/s10544-007-9091-1.

Abstract

We present a novel concept to process human blood on a spinning polymer disk for the determination of the hematocrit level by simple visual inspection. The microfluidic disk which is spun by a macroscopic drive unit features an upstream metering structure and a downstream blind channel where the centrifugally enforced sedimentation of the blood is performed. The bubble-free priming of the blind channel is governed by centrifugally assisted capillary filling along the sloped hydrophilic side-wall and the lid as well as the special shape of the dead end of the two-layer channel. The hematocrit is indicated at the sharp phase boundary between the plasma and the segregated cellular pellet on a disk-imprinted calibrated scale. This way, we conduct the hematocrit determination of human blood within 5 min at a high degree of linearity (R(2) = 0.999) and at a high accuracy (CV = 4.7%) spanning over the physiological to pathological working range. As all processing steps including the priming, the metering to a defined volume as well as the centrifugation are executed automatically during rotation, the concept is successfully demonstrated in a conventional PC-CDROM drive while delivering the same performance (R(2) = 0.999, CV = 4.3%).

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Centrifugation / instrumentation*
  • Centrifugation / methods
  • Cost-Benefit Analysis
  • Equipment Design
  • Equipment Failure Analysis
  • Germany
  • Hematocrit / instrumentation*
  • Hematocrit / methods
  • Microfluidics / instrumentation*
  • Microfluidics / methods
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Sensitivity and Specificity