CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Blood diseases affect one or several parts of it and prevent blood to accomplish its function.These diseases could be chronic or acute. For example, leukemia is a type of blood cancerthat starts in the bone marrow where blood cells are formed. Also, leukemia can be classifiedas lymphocytic or myelogenous. In some types of leukemia, it could be affected byany of the different precursors of the cell lines of the bone marrow as for example myeloid,erythroid or megakaryocytic precursors. Besides, iron deficiency anemia is one of the mostcommon anemia and is caused by a deficiency in iron present in the hemoglobin of redblood cells (RBCs). Ektacytometry techniques quantify RBCs deformability by measuringthe elongation of suspended RBCs subjected to shear stress. A patented optical systemdenominated Erythrocyte Rheometer was used to evaluate the viscoelastic properties ofRBCs from patients with leukemia and iron deficiency anemia by ektacytometry. RBCsfrom healthy donors were used as a control. From the diffraction patterns of several ofmillions of RBCs (subjected to shear stress), photometric series were obtained. On thistemporal series, it was evaluated non-lineal quantifiers in order to study fluctuations in theelongations of the RBCs. The dynamics of the cells were analyzed with the coefficient ofnon-linear correlation proposed by May and Sugihara and with the Hurst Exponent. Patternsof different behavior were observed in the utilized quantifiers. The patterns observedfor the leukemia patients showed a chaotic behavior while patterns from iron deficiencyanemia showed a random behavior like the control RBCs. The proposed quantifiers provedto be useful in the discernment of different pathologies associated with RBCs. Besides, theresults shed light in the utilization of non-linear quantifiers on photometrically recordedseries from erythrocytes subjected to shear stress for a quantitative characterization of thebehavior of the system under study.