Study of laser beam scattering by inhomogeneous ensemble of red blood cells in a shear flow

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%.