Stathoulopoulos, Antonios;
Passos, Andreas;
Balabani, Stavroula;
(2022)
Flows of healthy and hardened RBC suspensions through a micropillar array.
Medical Engineering & Physics
, 107
, Article 103874. 10.1016/j.medengphy.2022.103874.
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Abstract
Red blood cell (RBC) deformability is an important haemorheological factor; it is impaired in many pathologies leading to microvascular complications. Several microfluidic platforms have been utilized to examine the role of deformability in RBC flows but their geometries tend to be simplified. In the present study, we extend our previous work on healthy RBC flows in micropillar arrays [1] to probe the effect of impaired RBC deformability on the velocity and haematocrit distributions in microscale RBC flows. Healthy and artificially hardened RBC suspensions at 25% haematocrit were perfused through the micropillar array at various flow rates and imaged. RBC velocities were determined by Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and haematocrit distributions were inferred from the image intensity distributions. The pillars divide the flow into two distinct RBC streams separated by a cell-depleted region along the centreline and in the rear/front stagnation points. RBC deformability was not found to significantly affect the velocity distributions; the shape of the velocity profiles in the interstitial space remained the same for healthy and hardened RBCs. Time-averaged and spatiotemporal intensity distributions, however, reveal differences in the dynamics and local distributions of healthy and hardened cells; hardened cells appear to enter the cell-depleted regions more frequently and their interstitial distributions are more uniform. The study highlights the importance of local RBC distributions and the impact of RBC deformability on cell transport in complex microscale flows.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Flows of healthy and hardened RBC suspensions through a micropillar array |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.medengphy.2022.103874 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.medengphy.2022.103874 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of IPEM. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Blood micro flows, RBC deformability, Micropillar arrays, MicroPIV |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Mechanical Engineering UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10154257 |
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