Pre-transfusion bedside compatibility test is mandatory to check that the donor and the\nrecipient present compatible groups before any transfusion is performed. Although blood typing\ndevices are present on the market, they still suffer from various drawbacks, like results that are\nbased on naked-eye observation or difficulties in blood handling and process automation. In this\nstudy, we addressed the development of a red blood cells (RBC) agglutination assay for point-of-care\nblood typing. An injection molded microfluidic chip that is designed to enhance capillary flow\ncontained anti-A or anti-B dried reagents inside its microchannel. The only blood handling step in\nthe assay protocol consisted in the deposit of a blood drop at the tip of the biochip, and imaging\nwas then achieved. The embedded reagents were able to trigger RBC agglutination in situ, allowing\nfor us to monitor in real time the whole process. An image processing algorithm was developed on\ndiluted bloods to compute real-time agglutination indicator and was further validated on undiluted\nblood. Through this proof of concept, we achieved efficient, automated, real time, and quantitative\nmeasurement of agglutination inside a passive biochip for blood typing which could be further\ngeneralized to blood biomarker detection and quantification.
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