Abstract
Laser ektacytometry is a technique widely used for measuring the deformability of red blood cells (erythrocytes) in blood samples in vitro. In ektacytometer, a flow of highly diluted suspension of erythrocytes in variable shear stress conditions is illuminated with a laser beam to obtain a diffraction pattern. The diffraction pattern provides information about the shapes (shear-induced elongations) of the cells under investigation. This paper is dedicated to developing the technique of laser ektacytometry so that it would enable one to measure the distribution of the erythrocytes in deformability. We discuss the problem of calibration of laser ektacytometer and test a novel data processing algorithm allowing to determine the parameters of the distribution of erythrocytes deformability. Experimentally, we examined 12 specimens of blood of rats under the action of 4 shear stresses. Analysis of the data shows that in conditions of a limited range of digitizing the diffraction patterns, the measurement errors for the mean deformability, deformability scatter and the skewness of erythrocytes distribution in deformability by our method are respectively 15%, 20% and 20%.
Highlights
One of the main microrheological parameters of blood is erythrocyte deformability, which is dened as a measure of the ability of cells to change their shape under the in°uence of external forces
The information about red cells shapes is extracted from the di®raction patterns that are formed due to low-angle scattering of a laser beam while passing through a sheared low hematocrit RBC suspension
For a given shear stress, the same numbers are the parameters of the distribution of erythrocytes in deformability, namely, mean deformability, variance of deformability and skewness of erythrocytes distribution in deformability
Summary
One of the main microrheological parameters of blood is erythrocyte deformability, which is dened as a measure of the ability of cells to change their shape under the in°uence of external forces. One of the most convenient methods is based on laser di®raction by red blood cells in shear °ow (ektacytometry). The information about red cells shapes is extracted from the di®raction patterns that are formed due to low-angle scattering of a laser beam while passing through a sheared low hematocrit RBC suspension. All commercially available instruments yield the EI values measured over a range of shear stresses (SS), in some devices the SS range being user selectable. There are no generally accepted standards for calibration or evaluation of hemorheological instruments, including devices to measure RBC deformability and aggregation
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