Wash Optimization and Analysis for Cross-Contamination Removal Under Physical Constraints in Flow-Based Microfluidic Biochips

Abstract

Recent advances in flow-based microfluidics have enabled the emergence of biochemistry-on-a-chip as a new paradigm in drug discovery, point-of-care disease diagnosis, and biomolecular recognition. However, these applications in biology and biochemistry require high precision to avoid erroneous assay outcomes and, therefore, are vulnerable to contamination between two fluidic flows with different biochemistries. Moreover, to wash contaminated sites, the buffer solution in flow-based biochips has to be guided along pre-etched channel networks. In this paper, we propose the first approach for automated wash optimization for contamination removal in flow-based microfluidic biochips. The proposed approach targets the generation of washing pathways to clean all contaminated microchannels with minimum execution time under physical constraints. Two representative and fabricated biochips are used to evaluate the proposed washing method. Compared with a baseline approach, the proposed approach leads to more efficient washing in all cases.