Objective measures of information from blood cells.

An answer to the question, "The blood cell: what to measure? why?" is considered by proposing the use of indices derived from flow cytometric measurements. Indices derived from laser light scatter and fluorescence measurements of red cells, platelets, reticulocytes and leukocytes are described. To answer the "why" part of the question, I have proposed a statistical measurement evaluation technique based on information theory. This is illustrated by an example using indices to predict patient infection.