Single droplet on-line testing path optimization for digital microfluidic biochips based on the improved ant colony algorithm

摘要

Digital microfluidic biochip (DMFB) is an attractive platform for immunoassays, point-of-care clinical diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and other laboratory procedures in laboratory experiments due to its flexible application and low fabrication cost and further for the development of instruments. As being applied for these safe-critical applications, on-line testing methods are required to ensure robust DMFB operation and high confidence in the outcome of experiments. Prior work on DMFB testing paid little attention to on-line testing which test droplet will also work during bioassay, but it's necessary and important because some defects may manifest during field operation. So we proposed a new heuristic way by improved ant colony algorithm (IACA) to get the optimal routing path under fluidic constraints. Both static and dynamic fluidic constraints are considered in our testing method. The simulation results showed our method is convergent and could be applied in various operations to reduce about 5% testing time.