Combination of microfluidic technology and blood flow research may help understand cardiovascular diseases

Announcing a new publication for BIO Integration journal. In this article the authors Meng Zhang, Wu Zhang, Zihuang Wang and Weiqian Chen from Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, China, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA and Guangzhou University, Guangzhou, China review viscoelastic flow mixing in microfluidics.

The study of blood flow in vessels is crucial to understand cardiovascular diseases such as arrhythmias, coronary artery disease and deep vein thrombosis. In this paper a viscoelastic fluid in a microchannel is modelled to study blood flow.

The authors found that viscoelastic fluid has a transiently unstable flow pattern compared to the normal Newtonian fluid, and mixing is increased due to its elastic property. The integration of microfluidic technology with blood flow research could provide a new approach to understanding related disease mechanisms, and to analyze drug mixing and delivery in blood flow.