The Description of a Clinical Flow Cytometer

A flow cytometer is used to screen biological samples to detect medical conditions in patients. It has the ability to screen, sort and characterize cellular material in a short period of time. Flow cytometers consist of three main systems: fluidics, optics and electronics.

Clinical Applications

• Initially used for scientific and medical research, a variety of clinical diagnosis procedures now use the flow cytometer. Some areas of clinical application include hematology, blood banking, immunology, oncology and DNA analysis.

Mechanism

• A flow cytometer can simultaneously examine physical and chemical characteristics of single cells as they flow in a fluidic cell-to-cell single stream through a laser beam. Light scattering technology and fluorescent labeled antibodies are used to detect and characterize various cellular, chromosomal and other microscopic particles. A histogram or two-dimensional dot plot presents the acquired data.

Fluidics

• The fluidics system, containing the flow chamber, is used to inject the sample into a fluid for transport to the laser. This system moves the cellular stream through the machine to pass through the optics system for sorting and characterization.

Optics System

• The optics system consists of lenses, lasers and filters housed in an optical bench. This system performs the excitement and collection of light signal reflected from the sample when it passes through the system laser.

Electronics

• The light signals, from the optic system, convert to electric pulses. The electric pulses are converted to channel numbers which the computer system stores for data analysis.