چكيده به لاتين
Nowadays, the spread of cancer has grown dramatically and it is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. In this area, Circulation tumor cells (CTCs) has a considerable importance in the early-stage diagnosis of cancer. In addition, CTCs could be classified as "liquid biopsy" as a tool to monitor the patient after diagnosis, molecular identification and prescribing the most effective therapeutic approach. In other words, CTCs in introduced as a research tool to overcome cancer.
In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to provide CTC separation methods. So far, various mechanisms at different scales is provided for CTC isolation. Since microfluidic technology are capable of performing separation with high precision, considered as an efficient tool for this purpose. Considering the advantages and disadvantages of each of the CTC separation methods, each of them are only suitable for a specific purpose and not for a general performance. Therefore, it is a necessity to provide new approaches for optimizing separation parameters. CTC separation methods should have a proper efficiency, purity and flow rate to be appropriate for clinical applications; therefore, separation methods must have a high efficiency to be able to isolate a cell among the large number of cells. On the other hand, they must have a high purity to properly refine a blood sample from inappropriate cells. In addition, these methods should be required to have a high flow rate to be able to process classical containares of blood samples in a short time. Among the proposed methods, hydrodynamics approach provides a high separation efficiency and flow rate, and dielectrophoresis approach provides a suitable purity. It should be noted that size overlap between the CTCs and the WBCs is one of the challenges in the hydrodynamic separation method which leads to reduced separation efficiency. In this study, by using simulation tools and combining these two approaches, separation parameters were optimized and the particle size overlap challenge successfully managed. Furthermore, particles were separated with 90.89% efficiency and 82.56% purity at a 50 μl/h flow rate.
