Chaotic advection in a bioengineering system

Chaotic mixing is applied to the problem of the recovery of fetal cells from the maternal circulation. This is intended as part of a novel method in the prenatal detection of genetic and physical abnormalities in infants. The extremely low concentration of infant cells in the maternal circulation, the fragility of the cells, and the fact that the cells adhere to collecting surfaces only at very low shear rates contribute to the difficulty of this problem. In the fetal cell collector investigated here, a laminar chaotic flow is maintained to increase collection efficiency by continually randomizing the positions of the cells. Numerical simulations show that the infant cells in the chamber come into contact with the collectors (coated with an adhesive antibody in the actual system) and are collected at reasonably high rates.