New method of evaluating the liquid path stability of flow cytometer

There is no method to evaluate the status of laminar flow and single-cell flow directly in the flow cell of flow cytometer, in order to solve the problem, a method of high-speed particle image velocimetry based on the side Mie scattering is proposed. The velocity stability of the particles in the flow cell is used to represent the flow stability of the flow cytometer fluid path. Firstly, side Mie scattering images of the particle are acquired with the high-speed image sampling. Secondly, all the images are clustered to types of shortage, normal, diffraction and overlap, with the grey cluster analysis algorithm based on the trapezoid whitenization weight functions. Then, in order to improve the computational accuracy of the length of particle trailing, a mid-point method is applied to determine the boundaries of the trailing image. Finally, experiments are carried out to verify the feasibility of the comprehensive method. The trailing images are distinct and can be classified accurately. Moreover, limited to the system of this article, the average length of trailing image covers 125.4 pixels, and the standard deviation is 2.1.