Flow-based Augmented Droplet Routing Algorithm for MEDA-Based DMFB

Micro Electrode Dot Array-based Digital Microfluidic Biochip (MEDA) is a promising platform in biological and medical applications, offering high flexibility in droplet-based operations such as disease diagnosis, DNA analysis, and PCR testing.To fully exploit its capabilities, fast and accurate droplet routing is essential.In this work, we formulate droplet transportation in MEDA as a flow network problem and propose a high-speed algorithm that efficiently finds a minimum-time routing with low computation cost.The algorithm first determines the shortest routing time using maximum flow search, and then refines the solution using minimum-cost flow optimization to reduce redundant movements.The proposed algorithm enables efficient handling of large-scale problems, contributing to improved experimental efficiency of MEDA biochips.