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UW Medical Center

Automated Touchless Laser Cutter for Dried Blood Spot Diagnostics

Dried blood spots (DBS) provide a convenient, patient-friendly matrix for the collection and storage of whole blood for diagnostic tests. However, excising the actual spots from the cards is a slow process and is prone to cross-contamination when contact methods such as "punching" are used. Until now, the ever-present risk of cross-contamination in contact-based processing has limited use of DBS in infectious disease testing. Touchless laser cutting of DBS eliminates this risk without compromising processing speed. Thus, this student team attempted to build a prototype user-friendly laser-cutting instrument for touchless DBS processing. This student sought to develop a small footprint lower-throughput device, (b) create plans for a larger, more automated device, and (c) generate engineering credibility and insight to successfully seek additional funding to bring the larger device to fruition.

Faculty Adviser

Christopher Neils, Bioengineering

Students

Breanna Valdez
Colby Adams
Daniel Shin
Iris Wu
Nathan Heald

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