Particle property measurement

摘要

PCT No. PCT/AU95/00747 Sec. 371 Date Jul. 17, 1997 Sec. 102(e) Date Jul. 17, 1997 PCT Filed Nov. 9, 1995 PCT Pub. No. WO96/15446 PCT Pub. Date May 23, 1996A method and apparatus for the measurement of a property of particles suspended in a medium are described. In one embodiment, the deformability of sampled red blood cells is measured. A pulse generator (40) provides a narrow square pulse to a transmitting transducer (35), which passes an ultrasonic wave through the sample medium (15) to be received by a receiving transducer (36). The output signal from the transducer (36) is amplified by an amplifier (41) then subjected to signal processing. The acoustic absorption of the sample is calculated and scaled with frequency. The slope of a plot of scaled absorption with frequency gives a measure of the red blood cells' deformability.