Abstract
The thesis presents a controlled microfluidic system which consists of laminar stream-based microchannels. The control microfluidic system is consists of syringe pump and connective tube module. The working concept lies in the microfluidic systems that successfully replace traditional methods, which could select motile sperms without centrifugation steps. Simultaneously, the damage to the sperms could be avoided. The flow cytometric analysis is utilized to confirm the sorting efficiency of this system. The result showed that our study is successfully for sorting sperm. The fabrication process of our bio-chip include SU8 thick-film photolithography and soft-lithography, which has the advantages of biocompatibility, low-cost, high-precision, disposable, and easy to produce etc., so that it is suitable for biomedical chip. Reproductive medicine has become an important role in the field of medical science. The main reasons of infertility from male are the abnormality of sperms and the lack of sperms. IVF (in vitro fertilization) technology is a natural in vitro fertilization process that comes after a series of sample pre-treatment. The semen property, including motility, total number, and the concentration of sperms will directly affect the outcome. Therefore, the optimized microfluidic system provides a good opportunity to use and an inexpensive requirement to select the most appropriate sperms before IVF process. The study is divided into two parts. In the first part, the goal is to construct a microfluidic based controlled microfluidic system, which focus on the sorting and the classification based on sperm motility and viability. The details including chip design, flow field simulation, pump parameter setup, flow cytometric analysis, and the experiments of semen samples. In the second part, the sorting efficiency and chip redesign were focused to enhance the sorting efficiency in the quality and quantity of sperm. The result show that counted ratio of motile sperm can increase to 90%. Therefore, using controlled microfluidic system is successful to enhance the sperm motility sorting efficiency. At the end, some ideas of future works were proposed.