Correlated random walk: a fractal approach to erythrocyte viscoelastic properties.

A numerical method is proposed to evaluate the fractal correlation coefficient on viscoelastic properties of mammalian erythrocyte membranes from the diffractometric data obtained with the erythrodeformeter [16]. The numerical method is formulated on the basis of the fractal approximation for ordinary Brownian motion (OBM) and fractionary Brownian motion (FBM) [10]. Photometric readings performed on the elliptical diffraction pattern, generated by the shear elongated cells and photometrically recorded curves of creep and recovery of cells, are used in the calculations of self-affine Brownian correlation coefficient, averaged over several millions of cells. The time dependence of the correlation coefficient from different hematological disorders and also from healthy donors was calculated, and significative differences were found between both results. Diffractometric data belonging to healthy donors behaves as white noise, while data series from different disease were found to be chaotic.