| Speaker : |
Yu-Chong Tai, PhD Professor of Electrical Engineering and Bioengineering Caltech Pasadena, CA 91125 USA |
| Subject : |
MEMS for Biomedical Applications: Emphasizing Blood Count on-a-chip and Flexible Retinal Implant |
| Date : |
March 9, 2005 (Seminar room 2, Faculty of Engineering bldg.2, Hongo campus) |
| Outline |
As MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical-systems) continues to develop, there are more and more works moving towards biological and biochemical applications. Part of the reason is due to the growing maturity of microfluidics technology. However, I think there's another new frontier that can greatly be benefited by MEMS technology and that is Biomedical MEMS. Of course, there are serious issues when MEMS researchers look into biomedical applications. As a whole, the biocompatibility of MEMS materials is probably the most important issue and, in many cases, imposes the biggest constraints for the development of Biomedical MEMS. Therefore, carefully choosing the right material for the devices from the beginning is important. In this talk, I'll share our experience emphasizing two projects. The first project is to develop a blood count in vitro chip that can separately count red blood cells (RBC) and white blood cells (WBC). Here, we choose the PDMS because of its ease of use. However, the emphasis here is a new deterministic blood cell separation method that can separate RBC from WBC according to size differential. The second one is a flexible MEMS in vivo implant device for retinal prosthesis. Parylene is chosen for the retinal implant device because of its superb biocompatibility, but a series of parylene technologies need to be developed because it's a relatively new MEMS material. This device is especially targeted for DMD (degenerated macular disease) patients. The progress of the project will be discussed including the successful development of the high-density flexible electrodes, intraocular coils, and IC integration. Currently, these devices are under animal tests. |
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