Precise size-based cell separation via the coupling of inertial microfluidics and deterministic lateral displacement.

We report here a novel two-stage i-DLD sorter through coupling inertial microfluidics with deterministic lateral displacement (DLD), allowing for precise, continuous and size-based cell separation. The 1st stage spiral inertial microfluidic sorter is responsible for removing the overwhelming majority of background blood cells at a high-throughput manner. The precise and flow-rate insensitive DLD sorter with triangular posts serves as the 2nd stage sorter which further removes the residual blood cells for obtaining high-purity tumor cells. After demonstrating the conceptual design, we characterize the performances of our two-stage i-DLD sorter for the separation of differently-sized particles and cells. The characterization results show that a 100% complete separation of 15 μm and 7 μm particles was achieved while a separation efficiency of over 99.9% and a target sample purity of 93.59% was realized for the separation of differently-sized cells. Finally, we successfully apply our sorter for the separation of rare tumor cells from the diluted whole blood or WBCs at good performances. Our two-stage i-DLD sorter offers numerous advantages of label- and external field-free operation, high-efficiency and high-reliability separation, and high-throughput processing without clogging, and is promise to be applied as a potential tool for precise cell separation in low-resource settings.

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