Abstract
WHEN attempting to find the mean thickness of any kind of circular and biconcave-red cell, one has either to be content with the mean corpuscular thickness, obtained by treating the cell as a cylinder and dividing the mean cell volume by πr2, or one has to measure the dimensions of red cells on edge1, thus obtaining the greatest thickness, the least thickness, and so on. The former method does not take the shape of the cell into consideration, and the latter method is laborious. This communication describes a new method, intermediate in accuracy but sufficiently reliable for many purposes. It depends on the fact that the number of red cells seen on edge, in a preparation in which the cells are randomly oriented, depends on the mean dimensions of the cells, including the diameter. Virtually no cell will be seen exactly on edge; but a number will present themselves in the direction of observation in such a way that their observed thickness will be less than a selected value w—where w is a little larger than t, the true mean thickness. The probability f of such cells being seen in the preparation is an expression for which we are indebted to Dr. R. T. Cox (the proof of this expression is a little too long to be included here; but we shall be glad to communicate it to anyone who is interested), and which treats the cross-section of the red cell as a rectangle with a semicircle at each end.
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Ponder, E., Quart. J. Exp. Physiol., 20, 29 (1930).
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PONDER, E., BARRETO, D. Measurement of Mean Red-Cell Thickness by the Use of a Probability Function. Nature 178, 265 (1956). https://doi.org/10.1038/178265a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/178265a0
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