Blood screening using diffraction phase cytometry

Blood smear analysis has remained a crucial diagnostic tool for pathologists despite the advent of automatic analyzers such as flow cytometers and impedance counters. Though these current methods have proven to be indispensible tools for physicians and researchers alike, they provide limited information on the detailed morphology of individual cells, and merely alert the operator to manually examine a blood smear by raising flags when abnormalities are detected. We demonstrate an automatic interferometry-based smear analysis technique known as diffraction phase cytometry (DPC), which is capable of providing the same information on red blood cells as is provided by current clinical analyzers, while rendering additional, currently unavailable parameters on the 2-D and 3-D morphology of individual red blood cells. To validate the utility of our technique in a clinical setting, we present a comparison between tests generated from 32 patients by a state of the art clinical impedance counter and DPC. (C) 2010 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers. [DOI: 10.1117/1.3369965]