Simulation of light scattering by a pressure deformed red blood cell with a parallel FDTD method

Mature human red blood cells (RBCs) are light scatterers with homogeneous bodies enclosed by membranes and have attracted significant attention for optical diagnosis of disorders related to blood. RBCs possess viscoelastic structures and tend to deform from biconcave shapes isovolumetrically in blood flow in response to pressure variations. Elastic scattering of light by a deformed RBC provides a means to determine their shapes because of the presence of strong light scattering signals, and development of efficient modeling tools is important for developing bed-side instrumentation. The size parameters alpha, defined as alpha=2 pi alpha/lambda with 2a as the characteristic size of the scatterer and a, as the light wavelength in the host medium, of the scatterer of RBCs are in the range of 10 to 50 for wavelengths of light in visible and near-infrared regions, and no analytical solutions-have been reported for light scattering from deformed RBCs. We developed a parallel Finite-Difference-Time-Domain (FDTD) method to numerically simulate light scattering by a deformed RBC in a carrier fluid under different flow pressures. The use of parallel computing techniques significantly reduced the computation time of the FDTD method on a low-cost PC cluster. The deformed RBC is modeled in the 3D space as a homogeneous body characterized by a complex dielectric constant at the given wavelength of the incident light. The angular distribution of the light scattering signal was obtained in the form of the Mueller scattering matrix elements and their dependence on shape change due to pressure variation and orientation was studied. Also calculated were the scattering and absorption efficiencies and the potential for using these results to probe the shape change of RBCs will be discussed.