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Neutropenia is a condition where the hematopoietic system has a suppressed production of neutrophils, a type of white blood cell that is critical for fighting infections. This condition affects half to nearly eighty percent of cancer patients receiving chemotherapy, depending on the type of malignancy. Neutropenia can also be congenital or acquired from autoimmune disorders or nutritional deficits, in addition to cancer. Neutropenia, formally defined as <1500 neutrophils/µL in peripheral blood, puts patients at an increased risk of life-threatening infections. Thus, it is critical to constantly monitor neutrophil counts for many patients. Hematological analysis of neutropenia is performed by highly trained personnel at certified laboratories via complete blood count (CBC) and visual inspection which require complex, time-consuming, and expensive sample preparation and instrumentation. Thus, an easy-to-use, label- and reagent-free, and inexpensive hematology analysis device is highly desirable to circumvent these limitations and allow point-of-care disease monitoring and diagnosis. In this work, we demonstrate the application of deep-ultraviolet (UV) microscopy as label-free method for rapid and facile neutropenia detection. Our approach provides key hematological information and enables quantitative assessment of live blood cells based on their molecular and structural signatures in minutes. Here we show the ability of deep-UV microscopy to clearly identify patients with moderate and severe neutropenia based on an automated blood smear analysis. We also demonstrate a pseudo-colorization scheme which recapitulates the gold-standard Giemsa stains and allows visual inspection and enumeration of various blood cells types. This work has significant implications for developing a simple and low-cost point-of-care device that can ultimately improve the care and quality of life of many neutropenia and cancer patients.
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