A New Technique for Blood Cell Staining in Suspension

Blood Staining is needed to differentiate between its different cells. It is usually performed on blood film added to a microscopic slide. However, in some applications, there is a need to stain the blood in suspension, for instance in microfluidics devices. Thus, this work will propose a new method to stain blood cells in suspension. The blood cells were stained using 3 different techniques before being injected into the microfluidic device. Romanowsky stains, Hematoxylin stain, and our proposed modified Romanowsky stain were used to stain blood cells. Images of these stained cells in the microfluidic device under an optical microscope were taken. The staining techniques' capabilities in cell differentiation were evaluated through image processing using Color-based k-means clustering. Based on the results, the proposed technique was the best in terms of differentiation between WBCs, RBCs, and Background, where all WBCs and RBCs were classified correctly.