Abstract
The thesis presents an integrated microfluidic system which consists of laminar stream-based microchannels, makler counting chamber and flow cytometric analysis to enhance the sperm motility sorting efficiency. The working concept lies in the design of multiple channel systems that successfully replace traditional methods, which could be achieved motile sperms without centrifugation steps. Simultaneously, the damage to the sperms could be avoided. 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. With the advances in the technologies, 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 sperm sorting system, which focus on the sorting and the classification based on sperm motility and viability. The details including chip design, flow field simulation, makler counting, flow cytometric analysis, and the experiments of semen samples. In the second part, the microfluidic system with multiple channels enhances the sorting efficiency in the quality and quantity of sperm. At the end, some ideas of future works were proposed.