Sickle cell anemia--Diagnosis

The majority of Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) prevalence is found in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 80% of the world’s population who suffer from this disease are born. Due to a lack of diagnosis and early treatments, 50-90% of these children will die before they reach the age of five. Current methods used for diagnosing SCD are based on hemoglobin analysis such as capillary electrophoresis, ion-exchange high-performance liquid chromatography, and isoelectric focusing. They require expensive laboratory equipment and are not feasible in these low-resource countries. It is, therefore, imperative to develop an alternative and cost-effective method for diagnosing and monitoring of SCD. This thesis aims to address the development and evaluation of a smartphone-based optical setup for the detection of SCD. This innovative technique can potentially be applied for low cost and accurate diagnosis of SCD and improve disease management in resource-limited settings where the disease exhibits a high prevalence. This Point-of-Care (POC) based device offers the potential to improve SCD diagnosis and patient care by providing a portable and cost effective device that requires minimal training to operate and analyze.

Sickle cell disease is an inherited blood cell disorder that affects about 100,000 people
in the US and results in high cost of medical care exceeding $1.1 billion annually. Sickle
cell patients suffer from unpredictable, painful vaso-occlusive crises. Portable, costeffective
approaches for diagnosis and monitoring sickle blood activities are important for
a better management of the disease and reducing the medical cost.
In this research, a mobile application controlled, impedance-based flow cytometer is
developed for the diagnosis of sickle cell disease. Calibration of the portable device is
performed using a component of known impedance value. The preliminary test results are
then compared to those obtained by a commercial benchtop impedance analyzer for further
validation. With the developed portable flow cytometer, experiments are performed on two
sickle cell samples and a healthy cell sample. The acquired results are subsequently
analyzed with MATLAB scripts to extract single-cell level impedance information as well as statistics of different cell conditions. Significant differences in cell impedance signals
are observed between sickle cells and normal cells, as well as between sickle cells under
hypoxia and normoxia conditions.