Efficient Error Recovery in Cyberphysical Digital-Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Due to their emergence as an efficient platform for point-of-care clinical diagnostics, digital-microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) have received considerable attention in recent years. In particular, error recoverability is of key interest in medical applications due to the need for system reliability. Errors are likely during droplet manipulation due to defects, chip degradation, and the lack of precision inherent in biochemical experiments. We present an illustrative survey on recently proposed techniques for error recovery. The parameters of the error-recovery design space are shown and evaluated for these schemes. Next, we make use of these evaluations to describe how they can guide error recovery in DMFBs. By exploiting the flexibility provided by field-programmable biochip designs (FPBs), as in the case of their FPGA counterparts in electronic systems, we present a dynamic adaptation technique for error recovery in practical FPBs with a limited number of available control pins. Using two representative real-life bioassays, we show that the proposed approach can provide rapid error recovery for pin-constrained FPBs and it is more effective than recently published methods that target this problem.