The measurement of red blood cell volume change induced by Ca²⁺ based on full field quantitative phase microscopy

We present the measurement of red blood cell (RBC) volume change induced by Ca2+ for a live cell imaging with full field quantitative phase microscopy (FFQPM). FFQPM is based on the Mach-Zehnder interferometer combined with an inverted microscopy system. We present the effective method to obtain a clear image and an accurate volume of the cells. An edge detection technique is used to accurately resolve the boundary between the cell line and the suspension medium. The measurement of the polystyrene bead diameter and volume has been demonstrated the validity of our proposed method. The measured phase profile can be easily converted into thickness profile. The measured polystyrene bead volume and the simulated result are about 14.74 ?m3 and 14.14 ?m3, respectively. The experimental results of our proposed method agree well with the simulated results within less than 4 %. We have also measured the volume variation of a single RBC on a millisecond time scale. Its mean volume is 54.02 ?m3 and its standard deviation is 0.52 ?m3. With the proposed system, the shape and volume changes of RBC induced by the increased intracellular Ca2+ are measured after adding ionophore A23187. A discocyte RBC is deformed to a spherocyte due to the increased intracellular Ca2+ in RBC. The volume of the spherocyte is 47.88 ?m3 and its standard deviation is 0.19 ?m3. We have demonstrated that the volume measurement technique is easy, accurate, and robust method with high volume sensitivity (<0.0000452 ?m3) and this provides the ability to study a biological phenomenon in Hematology.