Patent ID: 7856323

Claim:
A method of evaluating the lipoprotein profile of a non-human animal or human, said method comprising: (a) obtaining a blood sample of said non-human animal or human; (b) separating serum from said blood sample; (c) delivering the serum to a centrifuge tube and adding an analyte material and a self generating gradient material to form a mixture; (d) centrifuging some or all of the mixture; (e) extracting the centrifuged mixture to form an extracted mixture; (f) measuring an analytical signal from the extracted material; (g) recording data comprising said analytical signal; (h) converting said data to cholesterol equivalent data, said step of converting comprising the step of transforming the data with a SAVR function (surface area to volume ratio weighted by cholesterol content expressed as a fraction) for each lipoprotein group and/or subgroup, wherein said data is normalized with said function for the potential cholesterol content contained within each particle; (i) transforming said cholesterol equivalent data using a calibration process with data from lipoprotein cholesterol standards; and, (j) thereafter calculating particle number data from said transformed cholesterol equivalent data.