Generic Sample Preparation for Different Microfluidic Platforms

Sample preparation plays a crucial role in several medical applications. Microfluidic devices or Labs-on-Chips (LoCs) got established as a suitable solution to realize this task in a miniaturized, integrated, and automatic fashion. Over the years, a variety of different microfluidic platforms emerged, which all have their respective pros and cons. Accordingly, numerous approaches for sample preparation have been proposed—each specialized on a single platform only. In this work, we propose an idea towards a generic sample preparation approach which will generalize the constraints of the different microfluidic platforms and, by this, will provide a platform-independent sample preparation method. This will allow designers to quickly check what existing platform is most suitable for the considered task and to easily support upcoming and future microfluidic platforms as well. We illustrate the applicability of the proposed method with examples for various platforms.