Flow cytometer is an instrument usually used to study the evolution of monomers, dimers and higher multimers of latex particles such as cells and chromosomes. Another use of this apparatus is to examine and count microscopic particles found in the urine such as RBC, WBC, EC, DEBRIS, CAST, Pathologic CAST, YLC, SRC as well as to measure urine conductivity by suspending the sample in a single stream of high speed aqueous fluid and passing them by an optical or electronic device. Flow cytometer is used in cytometry in sorting and measuring types of cells with distinct group characteristics by fluorescent markers labeling the surface of the cells. Flow cytometry, being a mature platform for quantitative multi-faced measurement of cell fluorescent is a high-throughput, high-content biological testing technique. This helps determine clinically rare types of cells involved mostly in diseases like urinary diseases and blood cancers (lymphoma and leukemia) since it is sensitive enough to generate specific data from minute particles with diameter ranging approximately from size of 0.5um to 40um in and is grounded on the principles of light scattering and excitation, and emission of light molecules.
The flow cytometer has wide optima with regard to the various characteristics of the flow configuration such as the rate of sample analysis and sheath flow, and the angle of incidence of the liquid jet, thus making it easy to adjust for optimal performance. This device is a well cellular analyzer capable of quantifying minute urinary particles and indicates some important physical or chemical properties of the sample being tested. It also has a dual detection ability of impedance and fluorescence developed mainly for cell analysis and particle-based assays.
This modern instrument is most often used clinically and is quite sensitive. Flow cytometer is useful in assessing the prognosis of diseases. It is routinely used in diagnosis of health disorders and is capable of detecting rare types of cell particle and residual levels of diseases. Like microscopes, it can analyze evolution of several thousand of minute particles. With its added capabilities, it can not only analyze but it can also isolate and actively separate particles with distinct group characteristic and properties in real time. Flow cytometer has the combined ability of performing very fast analyses on a statistically significant number of samples most often even thousands of different cellular particles to the capability of characterizing these thousand of non fluorescent cells from a morphological and optical point of view. This technique then is an easy to perform and low cost alternative to other fluorescent dyes or intracellular expression like techniques that use green fluorescent dyes. Use of low cost fluorescent calibration dyes became the hallmark of quantitative flow cytometry enabling direct comparison of interlaboratory data.