Development of a portable and sensitive blood serum test system using LED-based absorption photometry and pump-free microfluidic technology

Abstract

We reported a novel integrated portable human blood system based on absorption photometry and microfluidic technology. A capillary pump for fluid control was embedded in microfluidic chip instead of heavy syringe pump. The analytes could automatically flow, mix and react in chip. It achieves long-term stability of hydrophilic microfluidic channel surface for rapid and sensitive detection. Herein, we detected three analytes from human blood, including triglyceride (TGL), albumin (ALB) and total protein (TP) which are very important for health examination. All components of this system including light-emitting diode (LED) light source, microfluidic chip, photodiode detector (PD), electronic circuit, Organic LED screen and memory card were fully integrated into a portable instrument with small size (11.2 × 7.2 × 6.1 cm). The pair of LED and PD was used for measuring light absorbance of biochemical assay. The limit of detections (LODs) for TGL, ALB and TP were estimated to be below 0.1 mmol/L, 4 g/L and 10 g/L respectively, which is significantly below the clinical cut-off value. Passing − Boblok regression analyses were used to achieve the evaluation for this system. It showed good accuracy and feasibility of our system and was expected to be useful as a potential clinical tool for human blood serum test.