Development Of The Embedded Control System And Data Processing For Spectral Flow Cytometer

Flow cytometric analysis is an essential technology for the quantitative and multi-parameter analysis of single cell for many research fields,including molecular biology,medicine,immunology,pathology and so on.Developing fast and sensitive flow cytometric system is important for the advancement of life sciences and medical science.Based on the present researches of spectral flow cytometer,we developed a main-control system for data acquisition and automatic operation by combining embedded technology and flow cytometry.Meanwhile,we also proposed a self-adapted spectral unmixing algorithm based on GA and least squares.The system hardware was composed of ARM main-control module,FPGA sub-control module and peripheral circuit.ARM main-control module was responsible for the data storage and communication.FPGA sub-control module was responsible for the data acquisition and peripherals control.And FMC parallel bus was adopted for high-speed and stable data transmission between them.In the software aspect,ARM main-control program was designed based on real-time operating system FreeRTOS and file system FatFs.The FPGA sub-control program was designed according to the top principle.Besides,a self-adapted spectral unmixing algorithm based on GA and least squares was proposed to analyzes the full spectrum data and separate the overlapping spectra automatically without the premeasured single stained or un-stained samples as the basic spectra.Finally,the main function and application of the system were tested,and the results showed that the main-control system could realize automatic operation and fast data acquisition of spectral flow cytometer.In addition,the flow spectra of cyanobacteria was processed,and the results demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.