Abstract

The development of microfluidic devices has greatly enhanced our ability to investigate intrinsic properties of highly complex systems like cells and cell tissues [1]. The small dimensions, high tunability and superior versatility of these devices recently determined their wide spread in the field of military aeronautics where the health status of the patients is a primary goal of the medical team[2]. In this work we propose a novel configuration for a microfluidic chip which integrates an optofluidic section devoted to the generation and acquisition of the signal used to determine the pathological status of cells. Cell tissues acquired from a patient are injected in this device and kept fed with a specific medium. At this point tissues are stimulated using 4 different wavelengths to solicit fluorescent proteins (395 nm for the Green Fluorescent Protein-GFP, 383 nm for Blue Fuorescent Proteins-BFP, 514 nm for the Yellow Fluorescent Protein-YFP and 558 nm for the Red Fluorescent Protein-RFP) to reveal the amount marker disease-associated gene expression. A number of microfluidic channels constitute laser cavities obtained by modifying the dye concentration [3] and using a single pump laser, possibly. Fig. 1. shows the optofluidic section of the device.

© 2009 IEEE