Measuring Heart Rate from Rat Embryo Videos

Embryo cultures of rodents is an established technique for monitoring adverse e®ects of chemicals on embryonic development. The assessment involves determination of the heart rate of the embryo which is usually done visually, a technique which is tedious and error prone. We present a new method for fully automatic heart detection in digital videos of mouse or rat embryos. First it detects the heart location, and then it counts the number of heart beats for a predetermined period of time.