Novel blood typing method by discrimination of hemagglutination and rouleaux using an erythrocyte aggregometer

In pretransfusion blood typing, pretreatments such as centrifugation and suspension of red blood cells (RBCs) and mixing them with sufficient amounts of reagents are required, but these steps are time-consuming and costly.

Aiming to develop a new blood typing method that requires no dilution and only a small amount of reagent, we attempted to determine blood type using syllectometry, an easy-to-use and rapid optical method for measuring the RBC aggregation that occurs when blood flow is abruptly stopped in a flow channel.

Samples of whole blood from 20 healthy participants were mixed with antibody reagents for blood typing at mixing ratios of 2.5% to 10% and measured with a syllectometry device.

Amplitude (AMP), one of the aggregation parameters, showed significant differences between agglutination and non-agglutination samples at mixing ratios from 2.5% to 10%. Although there were significant individual differences in aggregation parameters, calculation of AMP relative to that of blood before reagent mixing reduced the individual differences and enabled determination of blood type in all participants.

This new method enables blood typing with a small amount of reagent, without the time-consuming and labor-intensive pretreatments such as centrifugation and suspension of RBCs.