Elastic light scattering from nucleated blood cells: rapid numerical analysis.

A model is presented to calculate the light-scatter properties of nucleated blood cells which are mimicked by two concentric spheres. The light-scatter characteristics were derived from the Rayleigh-Debye-Gans approximation and by simultaneous application of field averaging of the internal field and modification of the propagation constant inside the different cellular compartments. It is shown that the results obtained with this simple model are similar to those obtained with more complex and more exact theories. In addition it is demonstrated that simultaneous detection of the light-scatter intensities in the forward-, lateral-, and backscatter directions is required to optimize the detection of different cell types in heterogeneous populations of nucleated blood cells.