A method for the approximate determination of microparticle amount and mass in biological mixtures using a fractionation process in a centrifugal force field

Abstract

The paper presents a simplified method of estimating the amount and specific mass of microparticles in complex biological mixtures using the fractionation process in the field of centrifugal forces. In the presented method, using the heaviest blood cells – erythrocytes – as an example, a geometric model of a binary fraction in a borderline equilibrium state formed in the process of blood fractionation was used. In this model, an approximated shape of the erythrocyte and a sample normal distribution of the size and number of microparticles in the examined model fraction filled with erythrocytes were used. Based on publicly available blood data, it has been shown that it is possible to estimate the amount and specific weight of microparticles. The accuracy of such estimation generally depends on the precision of representation of shapes, the degree of filling the fraction with microparticles and on the individual quantitative and dimensional distribution of these particles in the examined fraction. The above conclusions, which determine the accuracy of the method presented, were verified in the paper with the use of rheological blood data, commonly available in literature for various types of measuring containers, which affect the level of filling of a given fraction with microparticles. Keywords: fractionation of biological mixtures, fractionation of blood components, erythrocyte model, erythrocyte shape, blood components