Monitoring CD4 in whole blood with an opto-fluidic detector based on spatially modulated fluorescence emission

Abstract

An optical detection technique termed spatially modulated fluorescence emission is described that delivers high signal-to-noise discrimination without precision optics to enable a flow cytometer that can combine high performance, robustness, compactness, low cost, and ease of use. The detection technique is demonstrated with measurements of absolute CD4+ and percentage CD4 counts in human blood. The performance is benchmarked by direct one-to-one comparison of measurements on the same tagged blood samples against a commercial instrument (BD FACSCount), with excellent agreement for both absolute CD4 and percentage CD4.