A portable spinning disc for complete blood count (CBC)

Abstract

Complete Blood Count (CBC) is a collection of the most commonly required clinical tests to assess the manifestations of pathological conditions in blood. The existing clinical methods for this test are prohibitively expensive for the underprivileged global population due to the requirements of sophisticated instrumentation and trained personnel. To overcome these, we propose a unique low cost device as a blood cell counting platform. The method exploits the difference in densities of cells for separation in transparent microfluidic channels and implements label-free imaging method for counting the separated cells within the microfluidic disc. The device is a simple spinning disc to estimate the parameters such as hematocrit, hemoglobin, red blood cell (RBC), white blood cell (WBC), and platelet counts with an accuracy > 95% as compared to an automated hematology analyzer. The major advantages of this device over state of the art include multiple sample testing within a single biodegradable disc, simple design and fabrication techniques, potential automation thereby making it portable and eliminating the need of trained personnel, and most significantly, eliminating any need for downstream processing of the separated blood. These results may turn out to be of immense consequence towards developing novel point-of-care hematological analyzers for resource-constrained settings.