A Review on Deterministic Lateral Displacement for Particle Separation and Detection

Highlights A well-organized and thorough discussion on the fundamental principles and recent progress in deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) is provided.The most updated designs and applications of DLD techniques for particle separation and detection are reviewed.The current limitations of DLD and its potential solutions for clinical and commercial applications are discussed.
The separation and detection of particles in suspension are essential for a wide spectrum of applications including medical diagnostics. In this field, microfluidic deterministic lateral displacement (DLD) holds a promise due to the ability of continuous separation of particles by size, shape, deformability, and electrical properties with high resolution. DLD is a passive microfluidic separation technique that has been widely implemented for various bioparticle separations from blood cells to exosomes. DLD techniques have been previously reviewed in 2014. Since then, the field has matured as several physics of DLD have been updated, new phenomena have been discovered, and various designs have been presented to achieve a higher separation performance and throughput. Furthermore, some recent progress has shown new clinical applications and ability to use the DLD arrays as a platform for biomolecules detection. This review provides a thorough discussion on the recent progress in DLD with the topics based on the fundamental studies on DLD models and applications for particle separation and detection. Furthermore, current challenges and potential solutions of DLD are also discussed. We believe that a comprehensive understanding on DLD techniques could significantly contribute toward the advancements in the field for various applications. In particular, the rapid, low-cost, and high-throughput particle separation and detection with DLD have a tremendous impact for point-of-care diagnostics.