Self-organizing dynamics of human erythrocytes under shear stress

The characterization of the erythrocytes’ viscoelastic properties is studied from the perspective of bounded correlated random walk (Brownian motion), based on the assumption that diffractometric data involves both deterministic and stochastic components. The photometric readings are obtained by ektacytometry over several millions of shear elongated cells, using a home-made device called Erythrodeformeter. The results suggest that the samples from healthy donors are intrinsically unpredictable (ordinary Brownian motion), while when studying beta thalassemic samples, these exhibit not only a great sensitivity to initial conditions (fractional Brownian motion) but also chaotic behavior. These results could allow us to claim that we have linked nonlinear tools with clinical aspects of the erythrocytes rheological properties.