Comparing of Frequency Shift and Impedance Analysis Method Based on QCM Sensor for Measuring the Blood Viscosity

Blood viscosity measurements are crucial for the diagnosis of cardiovascular and hematological diseases. Traditional blood viscosity measurements have obvious limitations because of their expensive equipment usage and large sample consumption. In this study, blood viscosity was measured by the oscillating circuit method and impedance analysis method based on single QCM. In addition, the effectiveness of two methods with high precision and less sample is proved by the experiments. Moreover, compared to the result from a standard rotational viscometer, the maximum relative errors of the proposed oscillating circuit method and impedance analysis method are +/- 5.2% and +/- 1.8%, respectively. A reliability test is performed by repeated measurement (N = 5), and the result shows that the standard deviation about 0.9% of impedance analysis is smaller than that of oscillating circuit method. Therefore, the impedance analysis method is superior. Further, the repeatability of impedance analysis method was evaluated by regression analysis method, and the correlation coefficient R-2 > 0.965 demonstrated that it had excellent reproducibility.