High-Speed Microfluidic Manipulation of Cells

This chapter discusses the recent advancements in microfluidic cell manipulation techniques, which operate in a "high-speed" manner. A high-speed process is extremely crucial for cell manipulation because the process speed directly correlates with biological sample volumes that the technique is capable of analyzing. The chapter first introduces each cell manipulation technique, classifies further based on its working principle, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the technology. The chapter tabulates all techniques and summarizes the cell processing rate based on the individual technique to easily compare all different approaches. The chapter focuses on cell deformability-based sorting via channel constrictions and general deformability-based cell separation. Cells can be purified using their intrinsic stiffness, and much effort has been made on investigating RBC deformability. Along with cell separation, another key cell path manipulation method is cell alignment. The most widely explored cell focusing application is flow cytometry.