Abstract

High-throughput Single-Cell Deformability Measurement Technique

Gangadhar Eluru, Research Scholar, Indian Institute Of Science

Disease conditions like malaria, sickle cell anemia, diabetes mellitus, cancer etc. are known to significantly alter the deformability of certain types of cells (red blood cells, cancer cells etc.). To determine the cellular deformability, techniques like micropipette aspiration, atomic force microscopy, optical tweezers, quantitative phase imaging etc. have been developed. Many of these techniques have an advantage of determining the single cell deformability with ultra-high precision. However, they are expensive and extremely slow to operate on a huge population of cells to realize a deformability based diagnostic tool. In this paper we propose a technique for high-throughput determination of cellular deformability on a single cell basis. This technique involves capturing the images of cells under different shear gradients while passing through the microfluidic channels. Performing morphological operations on these images helps in computing a deformability index. We demonstrate this technique for computing deformability index on healthy and malaria infected red blood cells. We believe that this technique has a strong role to play in the realization of a potential tool that uses deformability as one of the important criteria in disease diagnosis.