title: Evaluating the morphology of erythrocyte population: An approach based on atomic force microscopy and flow cytometry.
abstract: Erythrocyte morphology is gaining importance as a powerful pathological index in identifying the severity of any blood related disease. However, the existing technique of quantitative microscopy is highly time consuming and prone to personalized bias. On the other hand, relatively unexplored, complementary technique based on flow cytometry has not been standardized till date, particularly due to the lack of a proper morphological scoring scale. In this article, we have presented a new approach to formulate a non-empirical scoring scale based on membrane roughness (R(rms)) data obtained from atomic force microscopy. Subsequently, the respective morphological quantifier of the whole erythrocyte population, commonly known as morphological index, was expressed as a function of highest correlated statistical parameters of scattered signal profiles generated by flow cytometry. Feed forward artificial neural network model with multilayer perceptron architecture was used to develop the intended functional form. High correlation coefficient (R(2) = 0.95), even for model-formulation exclusive samples, clearly indicates the universal validity of the proposed model. Moreover, a direct pathological application of the proposed model has been illustrated in relation to patients, diagnosed to be suffering from a wide variety of cancer.
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Calcutta, Kolkata 700 009, India.
authors.forename: Sayari
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ghosh
authors.affiliation: Department of Physiology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata 700 009, India.
authors.forename: Ishita
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Chakraborty
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur 721 302, India.
authors.forename: Monojit
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chakraborty
authors.affiliation: Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Cancer Research Institute, Kolkata 700016, India.
authors.forename: Ashis
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mukhopadhyay
authors.affiliation: Department of Physiology, University of Calcutta, Kolkata 700 009, India; Department of Physiology, Ananda Mohan College, Kolkata 700 009, India. Electronic address: r_mishra82@yahoo.co.in.
authors.forename: Raghwendra
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Mishra
authors.affiliation: Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Calcutta, Kolkata 700 009, India. Electronic address: debasish.sarkarcuce@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Debasish
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Sarkar
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D004910:Erythrocyte Membrane / Q000737:chemistry / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D004912:Erythrocytes / Q000737:chemistry / Q000648:ultrastructure*; D005260:Female; D005434:Flow Cytometry; D064368:Healthy Volunteers; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D018625:Microscopy, Atomic Force; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D013499:Surface Properties
keywords: Atomic force microscopy; Erythrocyte morphology; Flow cytometry; Membrane roughness; Morphological scale; Neural network model