A quantitative method for measurement of HL-60 cell apoptosis based on diffraction imaging flow cytometry technique

A quantitative method for measurement of apoptosis in HL-60 cells based on polarization diffraction imaging flow cytometry technique is presented in this paper. Through comparative study with existing methods and the analysis of diffraction images by a gray level co-occurrence matrix algorithm (GLCM), we found 4 GLCM parameters of contrast (CON), cluster shade (CLS), correlation (COR) and dissimilarity (DIS) exhibit high sensitivities as the apoptotic rates. It was further demonstrated that the CLS parameter correlates significantly (R2 = 0.899) with the degree of nuclear fragmentation and other three parameters showed a very good correlations (R2 ranges from 0.69 to 0.90). These results demonstrated that the new method has the capability for rapid and accurate extraction of morphological features to quantify cellular apoptosis without the need for cell staining.