A novel first principles approach for the estimation of the sieve factor of blood samples

Light may traverse a turbid material, such as blood, without encountering any of its pigment containing structures, a phenomenon known as sieve effect. This phenomenon may result in a decrease in the amount of light absorbed by the material. Accordingly, the corresponding sieve factor needs to be accounted for in optical investigations aimed at the derivation of blood biophysical properties from light transmittance measurements. The existing procedures used for its estimation either lack the flexibility required for practical applications or are based on general formulas that incorporate other light and matter interaction phenomena such as detour (scattering) effects. In this paper, a ray optics framework is proposed to estimate the sieve factor for blood samples. It employs a first principles approach to account for the distribution, orientation and shape of the cells that contain hemoglobin, the essential (oxygen-carrying) pigment found in human blood. Within this framework, ray-casting techniques are used to determine the probability that light can traverse a blood sample without encountering any of these cells. The predictive capabilities of the proposed framework are demonstrated through a series of in silico experiments. Its effectiveness is further illustrated by visualizations depicting the different blood parameterizations considered in the simulations.