The simultaneous photoacoustic assessment of oxygen saturation and red blood cell aggregation is presented. Aggregation was induced on porcine red blood cells using Dextran-70 at multiple hematocrit levels. Samples were exposed to 750 nm and 1064 nm for each hematocrit and aggregate size in order to compute the oxygen saturation. As the size of the aggregate increased, the photoacoustic signal amplitude increased monotonically. The same trend was observed for increasing hematocrit at each aggregation level. The oxygen saturation of aggregated samples was 30% higher than non-aggregated samples at each hematocrit level. This suggests that the presence of red blood cell aggregates impairs the release of oxygen to the surrounding environment. Such a result has important implications for detecting red blood cell aggregation non-invasively and making clinical decisions based on the simulatenous assessment of oxygen saturation.

Date Published: 4 March 2013
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 8581, Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2013, 85813T (4 March 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2004960

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8581:
Photons Plus Ultrasound: Imaging and Sensing 2013
Alexander A. Oraevsky; Lihong V. Wang, Editor(s)