Abstract

Disease conditions like malaria, sickle cell anemia, diabetes mellitus, cancer, etc., are known to significantly alter the deformability of certain types of cells (red blood cells, white blood cells, circulating tumor cells, etc.). To determine the cellular deformability, techniques like micropipette aspiration, atomic force microscopy, optical tweezers, quantitative phase imaging have been developed. Many of these techniques have an advantage of determining the single cell deformability with ultrahigh precision. However, the suitability of these techniques for the realization of a deformability based diagnostic tool is questionable as they are expensive and extremely slow to operate on a huge population of cells. In this paper, we propose a technique for high-throughput (800 cells/s) determination of cellular deformability on a single cell basis. This technique involves capturing the image(s) of cells in flow that have undergone deformation under the influence of shear gradient generated by the fluid flowing through the microfluidic channels. Deformability indices of these cells can be computed by performing morphological operations on these images. We demonstrate the applicability of this technique for examining the deformability index on healthy, diabetic, and sphered red blood cells. We believe that this technique has a strong role to play in the realization of a potential tool that uses deformability as one of the important criteria in disease diagnosis.

© 2015 IEEE

Assessment of deformation of human red blood cells in flow cytometry: measurement and simulation of bimodal forward scatter distributions

Jonas Gienger, Hermann Gross, Volker Ost, Markus Bär, and Jörg Neukammer
Biomed. Opt. Express 10(9) 4531-4550 (2019)

Large-scale label-free single-cell analysis of paramylon in Euglena gracilis by high-throughput broadband Raman flow cytometry

Kotaro Hiramatsu, Koji Yamada, Matthew Lindley, Kengo Suzuki, and Keisuke Goda
Biomed. Opt. Express 11(4) 1752-1759 (2020)

Quantification of the fraction poorly deformable red blood cells using ektacytometry

G. J. Streekstra, J. G. G. Dobbe, and A. G. Hoekstra
Opt. Express 18(13) 14173-14182 (2010)

Cameraless high-throughput three-dimensional imaging flow cytometry

Yuanyuan Han, Rui Tang, Yi Gu, Alex Ce Zhang, Wei Cai, Violet Castor, Sung Hwan Cho, William Alaynick, and Yu-Hwa Lo
Optica 6(10) 1297-1304 (2019)

Measuring sickle cell morphology during blood flow

Inna Kviatkovsky, Adel Zeidan, Daniella Yeheskely-Hayon, Eveline L. Shabad, Eldad J. Dann, and Dvir Yelin
Biomed. Opt. Express 8(3) 1996-2003 (2017)