We used a unified Mie and fractal model to analyze elastic light spectroscopy of cell suspensions to obtain the size distributions of cells and nuclei, their refractive indices, and the background refractive index fluctuation inside the cell, for different types of cells, including human cervical squamous carcinoma epithelial (SiHa) cells, androgen-independent malignant rat prostate carcinoma epithelial (AT3.1) cells, non-tumorigenic fibroblast (Rat1p) cells in the plateau phase of growth, and tumorigenic fibroblast (Rat1-T1E) cells in the exponential phase of growth. Signal sources contributing to the scattering (μs) and reduced scattering (μ^'s) coefficients for these cells of various types or at different growth stages are compared. It is shown that the contribution to μ_s from the nucleus is much more important than that from the background refractive index fluctuation. This trend is more significant with increase of the probing wavelength. On the other hand, the background refractive index fluctuation overtakes the nucleus and may even dominate in the contribution to reduced scattering. The implications of the above findings on biomedical light scattering techniques are discussed.

Date Published: 22 February 2008
PDF: 8 pages
Proc. SPIE 6864, Biomedical Applications of Light Scattering II, 68640Y (22 February 2008); doi: 10.1117/12.762368

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6864:
Biomedical Applications of Light Scattering II
Adam Wax; Vadim Backman, Editor(s)