| In the developing world, there are large populations suffering from infectious diseases, many of whom are located in remote regions. Small, robust and low-cost medical testing systems are needed to assist in early diagnosis so that appropriate treatments can be provided. Medical diagnostic technologies made in the developed world often do not work in low-resource settings as they were designed to work in fully-equipped laboratories. With the rapid growth in microfluidic systems in recent years, complex functions of conventional diagnostic equipment have been miniaturized and integrated into small devices at the size of a credit card (so-called portable Point-of-care (POC) devices).;In this thesis a novel approach to overcoming the challenge of in-field biological sample processing and preparation to produce high quality fluids that can be readily used for downstream testings is described and proof of concept experiments presented. This approach uses hydrodynamic effects and combines nanoporous membrane with microfluidic systems and to filter the cellular component of blood. Experiments presented here demonstrate successful cells filtration from whole blood. Employing hydrodynamic effects is also shown to be an effective and potentially useful technique to isolate cells and plasma within appropriate micro-architectures. |
