Tsai Chia-Hung Dylan, Sakuma Shinya, Arai Fumihito, Kaneko Makoto
IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2014 Apr;61(4):1187-95. doi: 10.1109/TBME.2013.2296624.
This paper proposes a new index for evaluating the stiffness-based deformability of a cell using a microchannel. In conventional approaches, the transit time of a cell through a microchannel is often utilized for the evaluation of cell deformability. However, such time includes both the information of cell stiffness and viscosity. In this paper, we eliminate the effect from cell viscosity, and focus on the cell stiffness only. We find that the velocity of a cell varies when it enters a channel, and eventually reaches to equilibrium where the velocity becomes constant. The constant velocity is defined as the equilibrium velocity of the cell, and it is utilized to define the observability of stiffness-based deformability. The necessary and sufficient numbers of sensing points for evaluating stiffness-based deformability are discussed. Through the dimensional analysis on the microchannel system, three dimensionless parameters determining stiffness-based deformability are derived, and a new index is introduced based on these parameters. The experimental study is conducted on the red blood cells from a healthy subject and a diabetes patient. With the proposed index, we showed that the experimental data can be nicely arranged.
本文提出了一种利用微通道评估基于刚度的细胞可变形性的新指标。在传统方法中，细胞通过微通道的传输时间常被用于评估细胞可变形性。然而，该时间包含了细胞刚度和黏度两方面的信息。在本文中，我们消除了细胞黏度的影响，仅关注细胞刚度。我们发现，细胞进入通道时其速度会发生变化，最终达到平衡状态，此时速度变为恒定。该恒定速度被定义为细胞的平衡速度，并用于定义基于刚度的可变形性的可观测性。讨论了评估基于刚度的可变形性所需的传感点数量。通过对微通道系统的量纲分析，推导出了决定基于刚度的可变形性的三个无量纲参数，并基于这些参数引入了一个新指标。对健康受试者和糖尿病患者的红细胞进行了实验研究。利用所提出的指标，我们表明实验数据能够得到很好的整理。
