aFTLS Analysis for Sickle-Cell

Subra Suresh, director of the National Science Foundation (USA), is a co-author of a recent open-access paper in the Journal of Biomedical Optics on a new optical technique for studying sickle-cell disease.

In “Anisotropic light scattering of individual sickle red blood cells,” an international team of researchers introduce the anisotropic Fourier transform light-scattering (aFTLS) technique to measure and observe biophysical properties in the red blood cells (RBCs) of people with the inherited blood disorder.

They report the results of both static and dynamic light scattering on sickle-shaped RBCs. The technique may play a role in better understanding the pathophysiology of sickle cell disease and could be combined with other optical imaging techniques in the future to study other RBC-related diseases.

  NSF Director Subra Suresh (left) with SPIE President Eustace Dereniak at a meeting of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents in May.

The authors, who include Youngchan Kim, John M. Higgins, Ramachandra R. Dasari, and SPIE member YongKeun Park, report that “the dynamic light-scattering analysis reveals alterations in mechanical properties depending on the morphological type of sickle RBCs.”

The results with the aFTLS technique “provide evidence that effective viscosity and elasticity of sickle RBCs are significantly different from those of the healthy RBCs,” the authors state.

Suresh, a former dean of the MIT School of Engineering, was an invited speaker at a recent meeting of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, an organization of past, future, and current presidents of about 60 scientific federations and societies.

Source: Journal of Biomedical Optics 17, 040501 (2012).

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