Background:

Monitoring lysis in cell's suspensions can be a good indicator of cell's integrity and health. The current techniques to measure the number of lysed cells in some process are generally time consuming.

Objective:

In this paper, we investigate the viability of a simple method for sensing hemolysis in real time through the electrical impedance of a parallel-plate capacitor that holds a biological cell suspension.

Materials and methods:

The method is based on measuring variations of the effective dielectric function of an erythrocyte suspension during a lysis process induced by osmotic stress. Our sensor is strongly affected by the so-called electrode polarization phenomenon which prevents sensing variations of the real part of the effective dielectric function. However, measurements of the imaginary part, and thus of the electrical resistivity of the suspension, is straight forward.

Results:

We show that from resistivity measurements, it is possible to sense variations of the lysed erythrocytes' volume fraction with a resolution better than 0.1%.

Conclusions:

The proposed sensor can offer a high resolution in monitoring hemolysis and is a viable option for developing new rapid diagnostic medical tests.

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