This book is an edited verbatim account of the proceedings of the Second
London Workshop on Red Cell Filtration and Deformability, organised
jointly by the Royal Society of Medicine and the Groupe de Travail sur
la Filtration Erythrocytaire. The first such London Workshop was held on
the occasion of the Second European Conference on Clinical Haemorheology
in 1981 and its con- clusions were published in an abbreviated form. The
interest in blood filtration as a technique for assessing red cell
deformability has continued to increase and there are now several
hundred centres around the world using some form of filtration. It was,
therefore, felt that the informal detailed discussions held by a small
invited group of experts from many countries would be of more general
interest and therefore worth publishing. This has been made possible by
the continued interest and generous support of Hoechst. Spontaneous open
discussion rather than formal presentations has been the hallmark of
these workshops, with precirculation of all scientific data to the
participants. We have attempted to preserve this flavour in editing the
transcript of the proceedings. This, together with our anxiety for rapid
publication, may have resulted in a less than finely polished text which
may contain some in- accuracies. The topics discussed were loosely
structured into eight sessions, outlined in the accompanying programme.