Towards Wearable Real-Time Clinical Monitoring Using Microfluidic Devices
Martyn Boutelle, Professor of Biomedical Sensors Engineering, Imperial College London
Modern acute critical care medicine is increasingly seeking to protect
vulnerable tissue from damage by monitoring the patterns of physical,
electrical and chemical changes taking place in tissue – so called
multimodal monitoring. Such patterns of molecular changes offer the
exciting possibility of allowing clinicians to detect changes in patient
condition and to guide therapy on an individualized basis in real time.
Microfluidic lab-on-chip devices coupled to tissue sampling using
microdialysis provide an important new way for measuring real-time
chemical changes as the low volume flow rates of microdialysis probes
are ideally matched to the length scales of microfluidic devices. In
this presentation, I will describe the combination of miniature
electrochemical sensors and biosensors with 3D printed microfluidic
devices for transplant organ and patient monitoring. Concentrations of
key biomarker molecules can then be determined continuously using either
optically or electrochemically, using amperometric, potentiometic and
array sensors. Wireless devices allow analysis to take place close to
the patient. Droplet-based microfluidics, by digitizing the dialysis
stream into discrete low volume samples, both minimizes dispersion
allowing very rapid concentration changes to be measured, and allows
rapid transport of samples between patient and analysis chip. This talk
will overview successful design, optimization, automatic-calibration and
use of both continuous flow and droplet-based microfluidic analysis
systems for real-time clinical monitoring, using clinical examples from
our recent work.
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