FAQ

What is a biochemical analyzer?

It mainly analyzes the concentration of albumin, glucose, hemoglobin and other substances in human blood to describe the human liver function, kidney function, lipid and other biochemical indicators, and is one of the test instruments often used in clinical biochemical analysis. Traditional automated biochemical analyzer is large, complex, expensive and high maintenance cost, most of them are used in large and medium-sized hospitals, and can not be popularized to basic medical institutions and remote areas. In order to meet the biochemical detection needs of communities, schools, villages and other grass-roots organizations, a multi-processing control system based on microfluidic technology completes the blood separation, transportation, reaction and other processes on the microfluidic chip, which solves the problems of high cost and large volume of traditional biochemical analyzer.

What is microfluidic technology?

It is a science and technology that drives micro-nano liquid to flow and react precisely in micro-nano channel. Microfluidic chips, also known as lab-on-a-chip, where chemical and biological analyses are performed, are one of the technology platforms and devices used to implement microfluidic technology. The world's first commercial biochemical analyzer was a single-channel analyzer manufactured by Telcom in Tarrytown, New York, in 1957, which could only test one item at a time. Alere launched the Afinion AS100 micro biochemical analyzer, which can complete a number of indicator tests, but can only complete a single indicator detection due to the large volume of the detection box. Based on the centrifugal microfluidic technology, the Piccolo Xpress biochemical analyzer is launched by the American Abes company. It is small in size and accurate in detection results. It only needs to add 3-4 drops of blood to the microfluidic chip to complete the detection of 14 biochemical indicators at the same time within 12 minutes. The biochemical analyzer uses microfluidic technology to streamline the biochemical detection process, significantly reduce the sample size, and compress the equipment volume. At present, the fully automated biochemical analyzers designed based on microfluidic technology in China are innovated and designed on the basis of Piccolo products from the United States, such as Pointcare of Micro nanocore and SMT-120VP of Smart.

The current microfluidic biochemical detection technology is basically based on the Piccolo chip detection system, the microfluidic chip structure is improved, and a multi-processor portable biochemical analyzer control system based on ARM, DSP and FPGA is proposed to achieve human-computer interaction, motion control, temperature regulation, data acquisition and processing functions. The microfluidic chip is pre-loaded with distilled water diluent, so it only needs to add a small amount of samples through the pipette before the detection, and it can complete the detection of dozens of biochemical indicators at the same time without any processing of the samples, which well solves the problems of large volume, high cost, complex operation, and cannot be popularized at the grass-roots level. It has broad application prospects in point-of-care testing (POCT) field.