A contamination aware droplet routing algorithm for digital microfluidic biochips

In this paper, we propose a contamination aware droplet routing algorithm for digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs). To reduce the routing complexities and the used cells, we first construct preferred routing tracks by analyzing the global moving vector of droplets to guide the droplet routing. To cope with contaminations within one subproblem, we first apply a k-shortest path routing technique to minimize the contaminated spots. Then, to take advantage of multiple wash droplets, we adopt a minimum cost circulation algorithm (MCC) for optimal wash-droplet routing to simultaneously minimize used cells and the cleaning time. Furthermore, a look-ahead prediction technique is used to determine the contaminations between successive subproblems. After that, we can simultaneously clean both contaminations within one subproblem and those between successive subproblems by using the MCC-based algorithm to reduce the execution time and the used cells. Based on four widely used bioassays, our algorithm reduces the used cells and the execution time significantly compared with the state-of-the-art algorithm.