Efficient generation of spatiotemporal images for leukocyte motion detection in microvessels

This paper presents a method for generating spatiotemporal images to detect leukocyte motions in microvessels. Leveraging the constraint that the leukocytes move along the contour line of a blood vessel wall, our proposed method generates spatiotemporal images for leukocyte motion detection. To that end, transnational motion caused by in vivo movement is removed first by a template matching method. Second, a blood vessel region is detected by automatic threshold selection method in order to binarize temporal variance images. Then, the contour of a blood vessel wall is expressed by B-spline function. Finally, using the detected blood vessel wall's contour as an initial curve, the plasma layer of the best accurate position is determined to find the spatial axis by Snake and the spatiotemporal images are generated. The experimental results show that the spatiotemporal images are generated effectively through the comparison of each step of three image sequences.