Active Microfluidic Platforms for Particle Separation and Integrated Sensing Applications.

Abstract

The active manipulation and separation of particles in microfluidic systems using externally applied forces, such as acoustic, electric, magnetic, and optical fields, have transformed our capacity to detect pathogens, biomarkers, and environmental analytes with high precision and adaptability. These active microfluidic approaches offer enhanced control over particle trajectories, tunable separation thresholds, and compatibility with diverse sample types, making them highly promising for integration with downstream sensing platforms. This Perspective outlines recent advances in active microfluidic separation strategies and explores their synergies with biochemical assays, such as lateral flow tests, electrochemical sensors, and next-generation sequencing. We highlight the unique advantages and limitations of each technique and provide a comparative analysis across performance metrics such as throughput, specificity, and scalability. We also identify key challenges, such as system integration, throughput constraints, and label dependency, and propose future research directions to accelerate the deployment of these technologies in clinical, environmental, and point-of-care settings.