A microfluidic cytometer with integrated on-chip optical systems for white blood cell analysis

White blood cells are a significant part of immune system, which can prevent human body from infection and invasion of foreign invaders. The count and recognition of white blood cells plays an important role in modern clinical practice. There is an urgent need to modify the conventional methods (such as cytometry), which are time-consuming and labor-intensive for white blood cell counting. This paper describes a microfluidic cytometer for white blood cells integrated a three-dimensional hydrodynamic focusing system and on-chip optical components, which can realize single-cell fluid flow and single-cell detection. Through the experiment, the device achieves the hydrodynamic focusing of cell flow and the detection of side scatter and fluorescence. For classifying and counting of white blood cells, we further perform an experiment using blood samples and get fairly good results.