The effects of 3D channel geometry on CTC passing pressure – towards deformability-based cancer cell separation

Various lab on a chip devices have been developed recently to detect and separate circulating tumour cells (CTCs) for early stage cancer detection. Because CTCs are extremely rare in the blood, next generation CTC microfilters aim at significant improvement in both efficiency and throughput. CTC microfilters based on cell deformability seem to be a promising direction. In the present research, we study a CTC passing event through a micro-filtering channel with various 3D geometries. The pressure signatures for different types of cells passing through different channels are characterized numerically. Specifically, five kinds of cross-sections, circular, square, triangular and two kinds of rectangular channels with aspect ratios of 2 and 5, are studied in this work. The total pressures for cells passing through the channels are calculated and reveal different behaviour from what is predicted by the static surface tension model. Among all five cross-sections studied, the circular cross-section features the highest critical pressure and thus is most suitable for high efficiency CTC separation. The square filtering channel provides the second largest critical pressure, and the triangular cross-section provides the least critical pressure among these three cross-sections. All these three cross-sections are better than the rectangular channels with aspect ratios of 2 and 5. For the rectangular channel, a high aspect ratio channel may lead to cell splitting at high speed, which will result in a periodic pressure signature. Our findings will provide valuable information for the design of next generation CTC microfilters.