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Optical characteristics of flowing blood

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Journal of Biorheology

Abstract

The transmitted light strength (TS) through a thin blood layer changes with variation in blood flow, such as positive streaming transparency for low hematocrits and negative streaming transparency for high hematocrits. These phenomena are examined theoretically and experimentally. Maxwell’s equations are solved assuming that erythrocytes are oblate spheroids to investigate these phenomena due to flowing blood. The theoretical results reveal that the scattering and absorption cross sections for flowing blood are larger than those for stagnant blood. Experimental results indicate that the TS for both oxygenated and deoxygenated flowing blood, with a hematocrit of up to approximately 20%, was stronger than that for stagnant blood. The TS decreased for flowing blood with a hematocrit of approximately 20% or greater. Applying the theoretical scattering and absorption cross sections to the absorption and multiple scattering theory of Victor Twersky, the changes in the TS due to flowing blood are obtained theoretically. From the theoretical and experimental results, the positive streaming transparency phenomenon of flowing blood with a low hematocrit and the negative streaming transparency phenomenon with a high hematocrit are found to result from increased scattering and absorption cross sections because of the orientation of flowing erythrocytes.

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Acknowledgments

We wonder if these phenomena discussed above cause the measurement errors in various optical inspection machines. We hope the theoretical and experimental results will be of help to elucidate the measurement errors in various optical inspection machines. The authors wish to thank Prof. S. Asano, Tohoku University, for his kind advice in numerical computation. We also appreciate the students of Kitasato University and Chiba Institute of Science for their assistances in the experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Clinical Engineering, Nihon Institute of Medicial Science, Saitama, Japan

    Katsuyuki Sakamoto

  2. Medical and Welfare Engineering Course, Tokyo Metropolitan College of Industrial Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Norio Furuya

  3. Institute of Applied Superconductivity, Tokyo Denki University, Tokyo, Japan

    Hiroshi Kanai

  4. Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of High Technology for Human Welfare, Tokai University, Tokyo, Japan

    Naoaki Kanai

Authors
  1. Katsuyuki Sakamoto
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  2. Norio Furuya
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  3. Hiroshi Kanai
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  4. Naoaki Kanai
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Correspondence to Katsuyuki Sakamoto.

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Sakamoto, K., Furuya, N., Kanai, H. et al. Optical characteristics of flowing blood. J Biorheol 25, 52–63 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12573-011-0038-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12573-011-0038-z

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