Table 2.

Comparison of different cell enrichment procedures

Enrichment procedures	Basic principles	Strength	Shortcoming	Ref
Filtration	Divergence of cell size	Simple, fast, and cost-effective	Low purity and cell yield	[15,18,57]
Density gradient centrifugation	Divergence of cell density	Simple, fast, more accurate than filtration	Low purity and cell yield	[15,19,54,58]
Immunomagnetic separation	Specific binding of antibodies to different cellular markers	Higher yield and purity of interest cells Especially suitable for sorting rare cells Commercially available chips for continuous high-throughput analysis	Time-consuming and expensive Mostly applied for laboratory analysis	[15,56,60,62,71,52-56]