Patent ID: 6421121
Filing Date: 2002-07-16
Classification: G01N

Abstract:
A method for rapidly detecting and identifying microscopic particles for quantitative and qualitative measurement comprising the steps of:a) suspending the particles to be identified in a control fluid contained within a sample chamber; b) holding the sample chamber in a prescribed orientation with respect to an intense light source; c) illuminating the sample chamber with said intense light source; d) collecting and measuring the scattered light from the sample chamber by means of an array of optical sensors surrounding the sample chamber; e) converting a voltage output from the array of sensors to a digitized detector value at each instant in time and normalized by the sum of one or more digitized detector values to produce event descriptors; and f) comparing the derived signal with a set of frequency-of-occurrence/probability histograms to enable the identification of the microscopic particles present by means of a statistical classification algorithm.