Supplementary material from "Working principle and application of magnetic separation for biomedical diagnostic at high and low field gradient"

For such application, an external magnetic field is applied to drive the separation of target entity (e.g. bacteria, viruses, parasites, cancer cells) from a complex raw sample in order to ease the subsequent task(s) for disease diagnosis. This separation process not only can be achieved via the utilization of high magnetic field gradient, in most cases, low magnetic field gradient with magnitude less than 100 T m −1 is equally feasible.

It is the aim of this review paper to summarise the usage of both high gradient magnetic separation (HGMS) and low gradient magnetic separation (LGMS) techniques in this area of research. It is noteworthy that effectiveness of the magnetic separation process not only determine the outcome of a diagnosis but also directly influence its accuracy as well as sensing time involved. Therefore, understanding the factors that simultaneously influence the efficiency of both magnetic separation process and target detection is necessary.