Making General Dilution Graphs Robust to Unbalanced-Split Errors on Digital Microfluidic Biochips

摘要

Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) can execute biochemicalexperiments very efficiently, and thus they are drawing attentionrecently. In biochemical experiments on a DMFB, "sample preparation"is an important task to generate a sample droplet with the desired concentrationvalue. We merge/split droplets in a DMFB to perform samplepreparation. When we split a droplet into two droplets, the split cannotbe done evenly in some cases. By some unbalanced splits, the generatedconcentration value may have unacceptable errors. This paper shows thatwe can decrease the impact of errors caused by unbalanced splits if weduplicate some mixing nodes in a given dilution graph for most cases. Wethen propose an efficient method to transform a dilution graph in order todecrease the impact of errors caused by unbalanced splits. We also presenta preliminary experimental result to show the potential of our method.