ИСТИНА

Red Blood Cell Distribution Width (RDW) is a significant indicator of pathological processesin living organisms atthe early stages. Modern methods for counting and classification of red blood cells (RBC) are based on size measurements of each cell individually. ThatSuch methods areis time consuming and requires application of expensive equipment. Laser diffractometry enables one to measure the parameters of a large number of RBC (about 10,000 cells) simultaneously. This method is based on the analysis of diffraction patterns, which appear as aare the result of laser light scattering onbyblood filmssmears or highly diluted suspensionsof RBCs.Laser diffractometry is also widely used for RBCaverage deformability measurements.Further development of this method can potentially allow formeasuring the cell deformability distributions[ ]. The targetaimof our research is registration ofhigh qualitydiffraction patterns that are availablesuitablefor processing. This paper is devoted to analyzing the possibility of the RDW parameter estimation by using experimental data of the intensity distributions inthe laserdiffraction principlepattern.As a result of experimentalUsing data processing using algorithm [ ], we determined the average value of RBC radius and the dispersion of particle sizes. Furthermore, we measured these parameters independently byusing a microscope andvisual counting method using anoptical microscope.Comparison of the obtained results shows that our experimental set-up allows for determining the average radius of cells in the ensembletowith error lessbetter than 10%. However,estimationes of cell sizes dispersion measured by two methods differssignificantly, that’s why the improvement for more accurate measurements is necessary.