Anaemias diagnosis by label-free quantitative phase imaging

摘要

Gold standard methods for anaemia diagnosis are the complete blood count and the peripheral smear observation.However, they do not allow for a complete differential diagnosis, which requires biochemical assays, thus being labeldependenttechniques. On the other hand, recent studies focus on label-free quantitative phase imaging (QPI) of bloodsamples to investigate blood diseases by using video-based morphological methods. However, when sick cells are verysimilar to healthy ones in terms of morphometric features, identification of a blood disease becomes challenging even bymorphometric analysis as well as QPI. Here we exploit in-flow tomographic phase microscopy to retrieve the exact 3Drendering of Red Blood Cells (RBCs) from anaemic patients and to identify the pathology, distinguishing it from healthysamples. Moreover, we introduce a Label-free Optical Marker (LOM) to detect RBC phenotypes demonstrating that asingle set of all-optical parameters can clearly identify a signature directly related to the erythrocytes disease bymodelling each RBC as a biolens. We tested this novel bio-photonic analysis by proofing that several inherited anaemias,specifically Iron-deficiency Anaemia, Thalassemia, Hereditary Spherocytosis and Congenital DyserythropoieticAnaemia, can be identified and sorted thus opening a novel route for blood diagnosis on a completely different conceptbased on LOMs.