Red Blood Cell Responses during a Long-Standing Load in a Microfluidic Constriction

Red blood cell responses during a long-standing load were experimentally investigated. With a high-speed camera and a high-speed actuator, we were able to manipulate cells staying inside a microfluidic constriction, and each cell was compressed due to the geometric constraints. During the load inside the constriction, the color of the cells was found to gradually darken, while the cell lengths became shorter and shorter. According to the analysis results of a 5 min load, the average increase of the cell darkness was 60.9 in 8-bit color resolution, and the average shrinkage of the cell length was 15% of the initial length. The same tendency was consistently observed from cell to cell. A correlation between the changes of the color and the length were established based on the experimental results. The changes are believed partially due to the viscoelastic properties of the cells that the cells’ configurations change with time for adapting to the confined space inside the constriction.