Investigation of acoustic whole blood plasmapheresis for minimization of endogenous blood loss in neonatal care

Sammanfattning: Early erythrocyte transfusion is common in infants born extremely premature. Research has shown that these children are at greater risk of morbidity later in life, and that iatrogenic blood loss from blood sample analysis is one of the contributing factors to the need for transfusions. Acoustophoresis-based plasmapheresis could potentially be used to reduce the loss of endogenous blood components through return of erythrocytes to the bloodstream. The aim of this thesis was to provide a proof of concept for the use of peristaltic pumps in acoustophoresis-based whole blood plasmapheresis. An experimental acoustic separation setup with peristaltic pumps was constructed and used to extract plasma from whole blood. Functionality of the peristaltic pumps were evaluated based on separation performance measured with flow cytometry. Measurements showed that the pulsations generated by peristaltic pumps have a large negative effect on functionality of acoustic separation. However, the combination of peristaltic pumps with pulsation dampers were shown to greatly improve performance and achieved separation equivalent to when syringe pumps were used. The result of this thesis supports the use of peristaltic pumps in acoustophoresis-based plasmapheresis with whole blood.