Dielectrophoretic microfluidic device for the continuous sorting of Escherichia coli from blood cells.

Microfluidic diagnostic devices promise faster disease identification by purifying and concentrating low-abundance analytes from a flowing sample. The diagnosis of sepsis, a whole body inflammatory response often caused by microbial infections of the blood, is a model system for pursuing the advantages of microfluidic devices over traditional diagnostic protocols. Traditional sepsis diagnoses require large blood samples and several days to culture and identify the low concentration microbial agent.