2D acoustic focusing in a rectangular micro-channel of commercial flow cytometers

摘要

Flow cytometer plays a key role in cell sorting and analysis. For a higher detection precision, sheath flow is adopted to avoid the turbulent or vortex effect when the cell flowing through a capillary tube during the cell counting in many commercial cytometers. This method works well when the low flow velocity is relatively low. However, in order to have a higher analysis efficiency for clinical laboratories, a higher flow velocity is preferred, which always lead to cells siltation by using sheath flow. In this paper, to avoid this problem, an acoustic focusing method by using a pair of micro-size ultrasound transducers is proposed to help the cell flowing travel faster and smoother in a rectangular micro-channel of a commercializing flow cytometer developing by our group.