Kenneth M. Alfano, Michael Tarasev, Steven Meinesc(b) and Gene Parunak
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Red blood cells (RBC) can be damaged by medical products, from storage or from disease. Haemolysis (cell rupture and haemoglobin release) is often a key indicator, with mechanical fragil- ity (MF) offering the potential to assess sub-haemolytic damage as well. This article reports on a unique approach to measuring haemolysis, without the need for centrifugation or other sample separation. It also reports on employing that in measuring blood fragility (susceptibility to haem- olysis) under shear stress, utilising an electromagnet to cause a bead to oscillate within a cart- ridge that contains the sample. Cycling between stressing and optical measurement of induced haemolysis at progressively increasing durations of stress provides a fragility profile. Sub-system- level testing shows high accuracy for the haemolysis measurements and fair consistency for MF profiling. Improving accuracy and precision of profiling is a current focus and a fully integrated and automated version of this system is under development.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/03091902.2016.1153741