Figure 2:

Sorting mechanism, size cutoff vs. flow rate, and wall shear stress. A After inertial migration of cells away from channel side walls, CTC(C)s are separated from smaller particles at each flow siphoning gap (at bottom, a 16 μm cell passes to product side). B The cell diameter that results in 90% yield of CTCs into product is plotted against volumetric flow rate per NISA-XL device (25% of total flow rate; cells in Ficoll). C Input Mel-182–1 cell size distribution. Each data point in B is found by size-binning product/waste distributions in DE to estimate yield (plotted in F for blue diamond point in B). Gray region in B defines 95% confidence interval of fit. G A computational fluid model (Fluent) shows that peak wall shear stress is below 15 Pa at 200 μL/min (2 mPa-s viscosity).