A New design of a dual mode bioassay detection analyzer for digital microfluidic biochips

Abstract

Digital microfluidic biochips in recent years have been emerged as an alternative platform for performance of real time biochemical analysis and safety critical biomedical operations. Detection and analysis is a major task for biochemical analysis required to be performed on completion of a specific bioassay protocol in a digital microfluidic system. With the development of heterogeneous photonic component integration technologies it has become possible to integrate miniaturized optical sensing technologies that enable complex optical detection functions to be incorporated within the microfluidic platform. In this paper we have proposed a novel design of dual mode droplet detection analyzer to be coupled with a targeted biochip for providing automated detailed analysis based on the data acquired through optical detection. The proposed design employed in two modes - for both homogeneous and heterogeneous samples enables automated detection and analysis of different samples based on predefined characterized results. The architecture, synthesis and simulation of the proposed droplet analyzer for signals obtained for different bioassay protocols has been described in this paper - and the results are found to be quite encouraging. © 2012 IEEE.