Abstract

Microfluidics and Sensors: New Tools for Real-Time Clinical Monitoring

Martyn Boutelle, Professor of Biomedical Sensors Engineering, Imperial College London

A goal for modern medicine is to protect vulnerable tissue by monitoring the patterns of changing physical,  electrical and chemical changes taking place in tissue - ‘multimodal monitoring’. Clinicians hope such information will allows treatments to be guided and ultimately controlled based on the measured signals. 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. Concentrations of key biomarker molecules can then be determined continuously using either optically or electrochemically (using amperometric, and potentiometic 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.