BioViz: An Interactive Visualization Engine for the Design of Digital Microfluidic Biochips

In order to shorten the required time for the analysis of medical substances, Digital Microfluidic Biochips (DMFBs) have been suggested. They allow for handling small amounts of samples and reagents on a circuit board and, thus, automatically execute medical experiments that are usually conducted manually in laboratories. However, there are various challenges in the design of DMFBs. Issues such as routing and layouting are complex and currently being investigated by various researchers and engineers. Although first automatic solutions assist them, the obtained results are usually provided in a complex and \mbox{non-intuitive} fashion. This makes the utilization and evaluation of existing approaches for DMFB design a tedious task. In this paper, we present a solution for this problem by proposing a visualization scheme for DMFBs that explicitly addresses these problems. To this end, a grammar is proposed which allows the description of resulting designs and their properties. The contributions of this work allow for a design methodology which is easy to use and provides a hassle-free environment for the involved researchers and engineers.