Microfluidic Integrated Technology: A Potential Tool for Portable Radiation Biodosimetry

Abstract

In the event of a mass radiological or nuclear incident, a large number of individuals would require rapid biodosimetric screening for proper medical care, mitigation and follow-up procedures. Mass radiological triage is critical after any such large-scale event because of the need for Dose assessment of suffered individuals at an early stage. With the increasing probability of such unprecedented incidents around the world, the need for modelling and development of new medical countermeasures for potential future chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear has been well established. Unfortunately, the capacity of most of these methods are still restricted to laboratory establishments due to resource limitations, need of high end expertise or general immobility of bulky instruments required for the same. So far there exists no rapid diagnostic technique that may reliably discriminate levels of ionising radiation exposure based on samples collected at a single time point. In classical clinical settings, complete blood count, particularly the lymphocyte count is based on temporal assessment. The diagnostic ‘gold standard’ in the field of radiation biodosimetry is the dicentric chromosome assay which happens to be highly labour-intensive and extensively time consuming, rendering it inefficient in case of mass casualty situations. Advanced technologies such as microfluidic platform, BioMEMS, μTAS carry the potential to make system highly portable, cost efficient and independent of high skilled expertise. In this review of the latest advances in portable biodosimetry we evaluate our progress and identify areas that still need to be addressed to achieve true field-deployment readiness.