The absorption and scattering properties of three developmental stages of protozoan parasite Plasmodium falciparum were studied both experimentally and theoretically. Experimentally, the light attenuation and forward scattering from parasites extracted from host erythrocyte cultures were measured with UV-visible spectroscopy. The measured spectra were interpreted theoretically with a model based on the core-shell Mie theory in terms of the structural and compositional characteristics of the protozoa. The model accurately reproduced the features of the measured spectra of all developmental stages. The results show that realistic quantitative estimates of the parasite size, nucleotide, and hemozoin contents can be derived from the UV-visible spectroscopy measurements.

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This paper illustrates the implementation of a new theoretical model for rapid quantitative analysis of the Vis-NIR diffuse reflectance spectra of blood cultures. This new model is based on the photon diffusion theory and Mie scattering theory that have been formulated to account for multiple scattering populations and absorptive components. This study stresses the significance of the thorough solution of the scattering and absorption problem in order to accurately resolve for optically relevant parameters of blood culture components. With advantages of being calibration-free and computationally fast, the new model has two basic requirements. First, wavelength-dependent refractive indices of the basic chemical constituents of blood culture components are needed. Second, multi-wavelength measurements or at least the measurements of characteristic wavelengths equal to the degrees of freedom, i.e. number of optically relevant parameters, of blood culture system are required. The blood culture analysis model was tested with a large number of diffuse reflectance spectra of blood culture samples characterized by an extensive range of the relevant parameters.