Characterization of Biological Cells by Inverse Acoustic Scattering and Electrozone Sensing.

A technique is presented which characterizes biological cells by their mechanical descriptors: size, compressibility and density. The experimental apparatus consists of two acoustic transducers and an electrozone sensor submerged in a bath of conducting host fluid. Diluted biological cells are convected through the apparatus by a coaxial jet. An individual cell passes through the electrozone where its volume is measured by the Coulter principle, and then through the confocal region of the two acoustic transducers. One acoustic transducer sends out tone bursts at a center frequency of 30 MHz and detects a back-scattered signal from the cell while the other transducer detects the scattered signal at 90^circ. Thus the volume, the 90^circ scattering function, and the 180^circ scattering function are recorded for each cell. The acoustic scattering functions are then inverted to provide the compressibility and density of that cell. Statistics of the mechanical properties for human red and white blood cells are generated and displayed. The size, compressibility and density of both normal and abnormal red blood cells are reported. By modeling a cell as an immiscible mixture of protein and saline solution, perfect mixture laws for compressibility and density are derived and confirmed by experimental results. With the mixture laws established, the mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (MCHC) is inferred from the compressibility and density data for red blood cells. Using only the data from the 180^circ back-scattered signal, different white cell subgroups are successfully distinguished by their locations in the two dimensional histograms of their mechanical descriptors.