Description:
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This work demonstrates the use of a continuous online monitoring system for tracking systemic inflammation biomarkers during cardiopulmonary bypass (<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">CPB</jats:styled-content>) procedures. The ability to monitor inflammation biomarkers during <jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">CPB</jats:styled-content> will allow surgical teams to actively treat inflammation and reduce harmful effects on postoperative morbidity and mortality, enabling improved patient outcomes. A microfluidic device has been designed which allows automation of the individual processing steps of a microbead immunoassay to allow continuous tracking of antigen concentrations. Preliminary experiments have demonstrated that the results produced by the microimmunoassay are comparable to results produced from a standard enzyme‐linked immunosorbent assay (<jats:italic>r</jats:italic> = 0.98). Additionally, integration of the assay with a simulated <jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">CPB</jats:styled-content> circuit has been demonstrated with temporal tracking of <jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">C</jats:styled-content>3a concentrations within blood continuously sampled from the circuit. The presented work describes the motivation, design challenges, and preliminary experimental results of this project.</jats:p>