Ph. D. Thesis Defence
Dear All,
Department of Instrumentation and Applied Physics
Ph. D. Thesis Defence
NAME OF THE CANDIDATE : Mr. Eluru Gangadhar
DEGREE : Ph.D.
TITLE OF THE THESIS : Novel Microfluidic Techniques for Point-of-Care Diagnostics
SUPERVISORS : Prof. Sai Siva Gorthi
DATE AND TIME : Friday, 28th December 2018 at 11.00 A.M.
VENUE : Lecture Hall-1, Dept. of Instrumentation
And Applied Physics.
ABSTRACT
Point-of-care Diagnostics (POCD) is one of the rapidly growing areas of health-care sector that avails to the needs of the patient at the point-of-care. An ideal POCD device is required to be compact, portable, offer quick results, require no or minimal sample preparation, and inexpensive with a low cost per test. Microfluidics has a potential to cater to these needs, thereby leading to a growing research interest to develop microfluidic POCD (MPOCD) devices. MPOCD devices can be broadly categorized into cellular diagnostics and non-cellular diagnostics. Microfluidic flow cytometers (imaging and laser based) are the emerging diagnostics tools for biological cell identification, categorization, and counting. Despite the advances in this area these flow cytometers have not yet been turned into MPOCD devices. This thesis focuses on finding solutions for the major problems associated with these microfluidic flow cytometers towards becoming MPOCD devices. However, the developed techniques are quite general and can be equally well applied for non-cellular diagnostics as well.
More specifically this thesis presents techniques for focusing of cells in flow, in-flow decantation, and pumping along with the experimental demonstration of these techniques in the context of deformability estimation of cells in flow, blood cell counting, and quantitative microscopic urinalysis. Focusing of the cells while in flow is at the heart of the operation of flow cytometers. The developed technique reduces the complexity of fabrication and offers its applicability for a wide range of flow rates, thereby decreasing the cost per device and simultaneously offering the flexibility of its use in both imaging and laser-based flow cytometers. The in-flow decantation technique adds an extra dimension to the possibility of realizing sheath-free flow focusing, by separating the particle-free fluid from the sample itself. The simplicity of the design and the applicability of the technique for wide varieties of flow rates, particle concentrations, and sizes while having the ability to offer 100 % purity at high yields, offers its potential applications into the realization of MPOCD that can operate on plasma separated from whole blood for several biochemical assays, rare cell enrichment in cancer diagnostics, water purification etc.
Pumping is an unavoidable task to cause flow of either sample or sheath fluids into the microfluidic device. The developed pump uses the mechanical energy from the fingers and stores inside an elastic block to cause pumping action when released subsequently. The pumping mechanism is very general and is independent of the type of elastomeric block involved. However, the flow rate quantity and stability depend upon the nature of stress-strain curve and the stiffness of the elastomeric block used inside the pump. This pump is inexpensive (4 USD), compact, portable, and reusable (> 500 times) making it as an ideal choice for the POCDs.
Using the developed flow focusing device, deformability and the associated elastic moduli of RBCs (that are obtained from healthy and diabetic subjects) and cancer cells (with and without Emodine Anticancer drug treatment) were obtained and the results were found to be in agreement with literature. To further demonstrate the applicability of the flow focusing device for blood cell imaging and counting, blood cells (RBCs and WBCs) in flow
were imaged and the counts were compared with standard hematologicalanalyzer counts. Similar experiments were performed on urine samples to demonstrate the technique’s applicability for quantitative microscopic urinalysis. Wide variety of cells that can be found in Urine such as RBCs, WBCs, Epithelial cells, and Casts were imaged, and a quantitative analysis was performed to infer the diagnosis and the observations were compared with clinical results. All these results indicate the robustness of the developed techniques and their excellent applicability for a wide range of MPOCDs.
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ALL ARE WELCOME
CHAIRMAN
Date/Time
Date(s) - 28/12/2018
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Seminar Hall, Dept. of Instrumentation and Applied Physics
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