Abstract
Hemolysis test of medical devices is a test to investigate the blood compatibility of the devices. This test has a potential problem that the test results depend on the initial quality of the blood used for the test. We have proposed a simple and rapid optical method to assess the fragility of the blood cells contained in the test blood. When the blood cells are exposed to low osmotic pressure, damaged cells collapse faster than normal cells. Therefore the fragility of cells can be estimated from the change speed of the optical properties of the cells. The proposed method has enabled fast screening. In this study, we focused on the very early stage of the osmotic hemolysis to provide a faster screening method. The new method enables the measurement of diameter change of the cells in swelling process with no calibration.
