Study on Circulating Tumor Cell Separation Sensing System Based on Size Selection

Circulating Tumor Cells (CTCs) flowing from primary and metastatic tumors into peripheral blood are important biomarkers for early detection of invasive cancer and personalized cancer treatment. Because the concentration of CTCs is very low, obtaining high recovery and high purity CTCs sensors has become a hot topic for scholars. It is urgent to develop a fast, efficient and stable CTCs separation technology which can be widely deployed in clinical environment. Based on the principle of combination of hydrodynamics and microfluidic technology, the cell pressure drop equation of mechanical filtration hydrodynamic driving mode is established through the simulation modeling of sensor dynamics. The power-inertia disc circulation tumor cell detection sensor is designed. The sensor is coupled with modal analysis and fluid structure analysis and the internal structure parameters of the sensor are optimized according to the simulation results. Using the CTCs sensor proposed in this paper, high purity CTCs can be detected in blood within 30 minutes in vitro. Under more optimized operating conditions, 100 white blood cells were captured with 3.5mL whole blood, which was 20 times lower than that obtained with the basic size-based CTCs isolation device. In clinical validation, the standardized CTCs count changed from 10 to 60, with detection rates of 55% and 42% in 3.5 ml blood from patients with lung cancer and cervical cancer, respectively. The results show that the CTCs detection sensor designed in this study has the characteristics of fast, unmarked and high purity capture, which provides a theoretical basis for clinical improvement of high purity and high capture efficiency of CTCs.