Visualization of the cell-free layer (CFL) in a PDMS microchannel with a micro-...

• Author(s): Pinho, Diana ; Yaginuma, Tomoko ; Faustino, V. ; Pinto, Elmano ; Rodrigues, Raquel Oliveira ; Cidre, Diana ; Pereira, Ana I. ; Lima, R.
• Date: 2013
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/9107
• Origin: Biblioteca Digital do IPB
• Subject(s): Cell free layer; Plasma layer
• Document Type: Part of book or chapter of book
• Language: English

Description

Red blood cells (RBCs) have a tendency to undergo axial migration due to the parabolic velocity profile which results in a high shear stress around wall that forces the RBC to move towards the center induced by the tank treading motion of the RBC membrane. As a result there is a formation of cell-free layer (CFL) with extremely low concentration of cells. Based on this phenomenon several works have proposed microfluidic designs to separate the suspending physiological fluid from whole in vitro blood. However, most of these studies have the aim of the complete extraction of cells from plasma which is not the case of the present study. The biomedical device that is present in this work aims to obtain a CFL with a low enough RBC propose a combination of image analysis techniques able to measure automatically the CFL thickness before and after micro-stenosis is used.