Fig. 3: Characterization of the two-stage inertial enrichment using simulated cell samples.

a Overview structures of the cascaded inertial microfluidic device. b Cell focusing behaviors near the two-stage outlets at the optimized flow rate of 8 mL/min. c Cell concentrations of A549 cells and WBCs at the inlet and four outlets. d Recovery rate and purity of A549 cells and WBCs at each outlet. e Bright-field and fluorescent microscopic images illustrating cell distributions at the three outlets 2-4. f Size distributions of A549 cells (both in single and cluster forms) collected from the two target outlets 3 and 4 (p-value less than 0.01)