I-Corps: Portable Light Scattering Device for Field Diagnosis of Microcytic Anemia

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Iron deficiency anemia (IDA) and thalassemia trait (TT) are two common anemia types whose clinical presentation is similar, but with different treatments. IDA is treated with iron supplementation, while TT is left without treatment. In areas such as Mediterranean regions and SE Asia, the incidence of TT can exceed 10% of the population. The reason for this high incidence is because TT offers some protection against malaria. Treating patients suffering from TT with iron supplementation significantly increases their risk of malaria infection19, in addition to toxic iron overload and other negative consequences of iron over supplementation. Many patients live in low-resource regions and their access to centralized healthcare is limited, leading to under-diagnosis, under-treatment, and mis-treatment. The development of a portable diagnostic tool will have significant impact on society by increasing access to anemia diagnosis and, therefore, improve targeted treatments such as iron therapy.Elastic light scattering is a well-validated metrology technique to measure size distributions of particles in a polydisperse suspension with nanometer-scale precision. It has a long history of use in biology to study cell size, with most modern flow cytometers offering forward- and side-scattering channels. The proposed device will measure elastic scattering patterns for a simply prepared suspension of red cells in a single shot. Through the use of a pupil-plane imaging system and two-color illumination, the device will simultaneously determine size and refractive index parameters from cell distributions with better than 15nm accuracy in cell size, despite using consumer-grade components in its construction, well beyond what can be obtained by other low-cost devices such as portable microscopy.