Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 3
Flow Cytometry on a Chip
Peter Kiesel, Joerg Martini, Michael I. Recht, Marshall W. Bern,
Noble M. Johnson, and Malte Huck
Abstract
Flow cytometers are indispensable tools in medical research and clinical
diagnostics for medical treatment, such as in diagnosing cancer, AIDS, and infec-
tious diseases. The cost, complexity, and size of existing flow cytometers preclude
their use in point-of-care (POC) diagnostics, doctor's offices, small clinics, on-site
water monitoring, agriculture/veterinary diagnostics, and rapidly deployable bio-
threat detection. Here, we present a fundamentally new design for a flow cytometer
for the POC that delivers high effective sensitivity without complex optics or bulky,
expensive light sources. The enabling technology is spatially modulated emission,
which utilizes the relative motion between fluorescing bioparticles and a selectively
patterned environment to produce time-modulated signals that can be analyzed with
real-time correlation techniques.
3.1
Flow Cytometry
3.1.1
Introduction
Flow cytometers are indispensable tools in medical research and clinical diagnos-
tics for medical treatment, such as in diagnosing cancer, AIDS, and infectious
diseases [
1
]. Chemical and physical information are obtained from functionalized
microbeads or bioparticles, for example, cells, viruses, or subcellular complexes, as
they are transported in a fluid stream [
2
]. Conventional flow cytometers can analyze
microparticles at rates of
50;000 per second [
3
] and allow for extremely sensitive
measurement of particle-associated probes (<100 fluorophores per particle) [
2
].
P. Kiesel (
)
M. Huck
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center Incorporated), 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto,
CA 94304, USA
e-mail:
Peter.Kiesel@parc.com
J. Martini
M.I. Recht
M.W. Bern
N.M. Johnson
