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We investigated the behavior of red blood cells (RBCs) in a microchannel with stenosis using a confocal micro-PTV system. Individual trajectories of RBCs in a concentrated suspension of up to 20% hematocrit (Hct) were measured successfully. Results indicated that the trajectories of healthy RBCs became asymmetric before and after the stenosis, while the trajectories of tracer particles in pure water were almost symmetric. The asymmetry was greater in 10% Hct than in 20% Hct. We also investigated the effect of deformability of RBCs on the cell-free layer thickness by hardening RBCs using a glutaraldehyde treatment. The results indicated that deformability is the key factor in the asymmetry of cell-free layer thickness. Therefore, the motions of RBCs are influenced strongly by the Hct, the deformability, and the channel geometry. These results give fundamental knowledge for a better understanding of blood flow in microcirculation and biomedical microdevices.

The enumeration of chemical graphs satisfying given constraints is one of the fundamental problems in chemoinformatics. In this paper, we consider the problem of enumerating (i.e., listing) all treelike chemical graphs from a given path frequency. We propose an exact algorithm for enumerating all solutions to this problem on the basis of the branch-and-bound method. To further improve the efficiency of the enumeration, we introduce a new variant of the compound enumeration problem by adding a specification on the number of multiple bonds to the input and design another exact enumeration algorithm. The experimental results show that our algorithms can efficiently solve instances with larger sizes that are impossible to solve by the previous methods. In particular, we apply the latter algorithm to the enumeration problem of the special treelike chemical structures-alkane isomers. The theoretical and experimental results show that our algorithm works at least as fast as the state-of-the-art algorithms specially designed for generating alkane isomers, however using much less memory space.