However, the relation with blood pathologies is in many aspects an open problem for the development of reliable applications of microfluidics to Point of Care Diagnostics, where new approaches to rheometry using microfluidics are fundamental to create and improve PoC devices.įrom a macro-rheological point of view, it is known that, the viscosity of blood is directly proportional to the hematocrit (concentration of red blood cells), meaning that, an increase or decrease of the RBC concentration affects blood viscosity values, as well as its non-Newtonian behavior, which is lost at low hematocrit. Moreover, some works have been published on the possibility of coupling microscopy and microfluidics for diagnostic applications. Several experimental and numerical studies have analyzed the behavior of RBCs and their relation with the viscosity of whole blood using microfluidics. The rise of microfluidics in the past decades has opened alternative methods to measure the rheological properties of fluids, including blood. The viscosity of blood depends highly on its red blood cell (RBCs) concentration and biomechanical properties, such as aggregation and membrane elasticity. This characteristic of blood is known as shear thinning, which is the property of some complex fluids to decrease their viscosity as the shear rate increases (e.g., increasing its flow velocity), and it has been widely observed in blood. The rheological properties of blood have been studied for many years, and it has been clearly demonstrated that blood has a non-Newtonian behavior. By means of these normalization methods, we were able to determine the differences between the red blood cells of the samples and define a range where healthy blood samples can be described by a single behavior. The proposed methodology is able to predict the health conditions of the blood samples by introducing a non-dimensional coefficient that accounts for the response to shear rate of the different donors blood samples. In this work, we present two methods that successfully normalize the viscosity of blood for a single and for different donors, first according to the concentration of erythrocytes and second according to the shear rate. Using an experimental analysis of the interface advancement of blood in a microchannel, we determine the viscosity of different samples of blood. These properties affect the viscosity of blood as well as its shear thinning behavior. The rheological properties of blood depend highly on the properties of its red blood cells: concentration, membrane elasticity, and aggregation.
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