Effects of Cellular Fine Structure on Scattered Light Pattern

Abstract

Biological cells are complex in both morphological and biochemical structure. The effects of cellular fine structure on light scattered from cells are studied by employing a three-dimensional code named AETHER which solves the full set of Maxwell equations by using the finite-difference time-domain method. It is shown that changes in cellular fine structure can cause significant changes in the scattered light pattern over particular scattering angles. These changes potentially provide the possibility for distinguishability of cellular intrastructures. The effects that features of different intrastructure have on scattered light are discussed from the viewpoint of diagnosing cellular fine structure. Finally, we discuss scattered light patterns for lymphocyte-like cells and basophil-like cells.

Generalized multiparticle Mie modeling of light scattering by cells

“…Our study is consistent with earlier findings studied by FDTD methods [5]. The effect of the organelle quantity and distribution on the light distribution scattering pattern is an example to a cellular based optical diagnosis method.…”

“…Finally, it does not take into account the effects of membrane on scattering, because the GMM method is unable to resolve the cell membrane. This is a reasonable approximation, previous study has found that the membrane has a relatively small contribution to scattering [5]. Based on the above assumptions, the cell can be simply modelled as a dielectric object consisting of any number of organelles varying with sizes and reflective indices as illustrated in Figure 1.…”

“…Many of these techniques, such as optical tomography, flow cytometry and elastic scattering spectroscopy, rely on correlating the scattering properties of tissue to infer its physiological state. The spatial distribution of the scattered light intensity depends on cell's morphology and the polarization states of incident light [5,6]. While the complete solution to the inverse problem of light scattering from single cells still remains a challenge, we can extract cellular morphological information from the scattered light in specific angular ranges or the overall pattern to discriminate different cell types.…”

Spatial scattering specificities study on label free clinical lymphocyte cells of human peripheral blood

“…In this study, a novel method is put forward to reconstruct clinical cell's equivalent 3D structures according to these 2D structure parameters, which is obviously better than the models used previous researches [8] that make real cell as an inerratic rotator. In our method, cells are set as also rotators but with irregular shapes.…”

“…Some research results have indicated that cells shape and other structure variances are closely related to cells pathological changing conditions [6][7]. Based on these achievements in medical science, Caigen Liu and his group since 2006 dedicated to study the relationships of scattering spectra with regular structures [8]. But unfortunately, all the cells' models they adopted are regular and quite simple, such as sphere.…”