Precisely Enumerating Circulating Tumor Cells Utilizing Microfluidic Chip

Enumerating CTCs has been demonstrated to be helpful for cancer treatments.Despite multiple mechanisms have proved effective on isolating CTC-like cells,the decisive identification of CTCs still relies on manually interpreting immuno-fluorescent images of all cells.This procedure is time costly and more importantly,easily affected by subjective criteria of diverse examiners.Here we present the validation of a platform for accurate and automatic CTC enumeration with a common objective criterion.The platform mainly consists of a multifunctional microfluidic chip and a unique image processing algorithm.The microfluidic chip integrates blood filtering,cell isolating and single cell positioning to simultaneously achieve minimum cell loss,efficient cell isolation and regular arraying of single cells.By making the best use of the microfluidic chip to lighten the calculation loads and eliminate the measurement errors,the specially designed algorithm has the capability of rapidly interpreting hundreds of images to provide accurate CTC numbers.After carefully optimizing the integrated microfluidic chip,the image processing algorithm and their collaboration,we verified the whole platform with enumerating CTCs from 6 clinical blood samples.Compared with tube-based CTC isolation and manually CTC identification,our platform realized better accuracy and reduced the time cost by 50%.This automatic CTC enumeration platform constitutes a promising strategy of utilizing a specially designed multi-functional microfluidic chip and a unique image processing algorithm to technically prompt CTC enumeration being clinically accepted as a routine blood test.