Abstract
Separation and detection are ubiquitous in our daily life and they are two of the most important steps toward practical biomedical diagnostics and industrial applications. A deep understanding of working principles and examples of separation and detection enables a plethora of applications from blood test and air/water quality monitoring to food safety and biosecurity; none of which are irrelevant to public health. Microfluidics can separate and detect various particles/aerosols as well as cells/viruses in a cost-effective and easy-to-operate manner. There are a number of papers reviewing microfluidic separation and detection, but to the best of our knowledge, the two topics are normally reviewed separately. In fact, these two themes are closely related with each other from the perspectives of public health: understanding separation or sorting technique will lead to the development of new detection methods, thereby providing new paths to guide the separation routes. Therefore, the purpose of this review paper is two-fold: reporting the latest developments in the application of microfluidics for separation and outlining the emerging research in microfluidic detection. The dominating microfluidics-based passive separation methods and detection methods are discussed, along with the future perspectives and challenges being discussed. Our work inspires novel development of separation and detection methods for the benefits of public health.
Highlights
Public health is closely related to human wellbeing at diverse levels from our neighbor community to the national or even global security, covering the prevention, control, and treatment of major diseases, especially infectious diseases and noncommunicable chronic diseases, as well as supervision and control of food, drug, and public environmental sanitation
The present study aims to give an overview of state-of-art microfluidic separation and detection technologies from the perspectives of public health, and we focus on separation and detection because they are two of the most important steps toward practical applications in disease detection, food safety analysis, and environmental monitoring and detection
To improve the low efficiency of single-stage multiorifice flow fractionation (SS-MOFF) in separation for large particles, multistage multiorifice flow fractionation (MS-MOFF) was developed to isolate rare cells from human blood with a recovery increased from 73.2% to 88.7% while the purity slightly decreased from 91.4% to 89.1% [106]
Summary
Public health is closely related to human wellbeing at diverse levels from our neighbor community to the national or even global security, covering the prevention, control, and treatment of major diseases, especially infectious diseases and noncommunicable chronic diseases, as well as supervision and control of food, drug, and public environmental sanitation. In addition to infectious diseases, noncommunicable chronic diseases are an important threat to human health, such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes, which are mainly caused by unhealthy lifestyle and living environment These kinds of diseases have a high incidence rate, disability rate, mortality rate, and medical expense, which can be thawed by early diagnosis and treatment. The present study aims to give an overview of state-of-art microfluidic separation and detection technologies from the perspectives of public health, and we focus on separation and detection because they are two of the most important steps toward practical applications in disease detection, food safety analysis, and environmental monitoring and detection. The challenges and prospects of microfluidic separation and detection technology are discussed
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