LEAP-HI: Automated Design for 3D Printing of Microfluidic Devices for Healthcare Applications

微流体技术使用信用卡大小的设备（“生物芯片”）中的头发大小的通道来分析用于医学测试和药物发现的流体。微流控技术已被证明可以提高医疗测试和药物发现的准确性、速度和成本，但微流控设备的一个关键问题是，每项医疗测试都需要定制设计，这使得微流控芯片相对昂贵。3D打印（3DP）具有快速、廉价地制造定制设备的潜力，但当今的设计方法既缓慢又昂贵。在电子芯片设计中，工程师们已经开发出自动设计芯片的工具。这个美国繁荣、健康和基础设施的领先工程（LEAP-HI）项目将研究类似的自动化设计工具，用于使用3DP生产定制的微流体设备。这种软件可以使医疗技术人员和研究人员通过将功能描述转换为设计，在计算机上测试自动生成的设计，然后打印设备以立即使用，来设计和打印他们自己的设备。研究的微流体设备可能成为医疗保健，食品安全，环境测试和生物防御的关键部分。该研究涉及制造、设计自动化、优化、生物化学和流体动力学等多个学科，将研究集成电路行业已经采用的设计自动化方法和软件的适应性，以提高医疗保健应用微流体设备的设计、验证和制造效率。它将专注于高效设计，测试，3D布局和布线以及生物芯片处理的算法，这些算法结合了对3DP制造过程的物理理解，为快速生产微流体生物芯片提供设计自动化工具。此外，该项目将在软件中编纂微流体3D打印的最佳实践，目前大多数从业者对此知之甚少。对于组件库中使用的单个组件，该项目的研究人员将深入了解微流体组件如何扩展以及组合这些组件的物理特性。这项工作还将帮助用户了解增材制造用于微流体的能力和限制。该方法将通过使用工具来设计，优化，制造和测试医学化学和DNA/RNA分析设备进行验证。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Microfluidics uses hair-sized channels in credit card sized devices ("biochips") to analyze fluids for medical tests and drug discovery. Microfluidics has been shown to improve the accuracy, speed, and cost of medical tests and drug discovery, but a key problem with microfluidic devices is that every medical test needs to be custom designed, making microfluidic chips relatively expensive. 3D Printing (3DP) has the potential to make custom devices quickly and inexpensively, but today's design methods are slow and expensive. In electronic microchip design, engineers have developed tools to design chips automatically. This Leading Engineering for America's Prosperity, Health, and Infrastructure (LEAP-HI) project will research similar automated design tools for producing custom microfluidic devices using 3DP. Such software can enable medical technicians and researchers to design and print their own devices by converting functional descriptions to designs, testing the automatically generated designs on a computer, and then printing devices for immediate use. The researched microfluidic devices could become a critical part of healthcare, food safety, environmental testing, and biodefense. The research engages multiple disciplines, including manufacturing, design automation, optimization, biochemistry, and fluid dynamics.The project will research the adaptation of design automation approaches and software already employed by the integrated circuit industry to improve the efficiency of design, validation, and manufacturing of microfluidic devices for healthcare applications. It will focus on algorithms for the efficient design, testing, 3D placement and routing, and handling of biochips that incorporate physical understanding of the 3DP manufacturing process to provide design automation tools for quickly producing microfluidic biochips. In addition, the project will codify best practices for microfluidic 3D printing, which are currently poorly understood by most practitioners, in software. For the individual components used in the component libraries, researchers on the project will generate a deep understanding of how microfluidic components scale and the physics of combining these components. The work will also help users to understand the capabilities and limits of additive manufacturing for use in microfluidics. The approach will be validated by using the tools to design, optimize, fabricate, and test medical chemistry and DNA/RNA analysis devices.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.