Measuring Microcirculation Using Spatiotemporal Image Analysis

This paper describes a method for recognizing and measuring the motion of each individual leukocyte in microvessels from a sequence of images. A spatiotemporal image is generated whose spatial axes are parallel and vertical to vessel region contours. In order to enhance and extract only leukocyte traces with a tuned velocity range even under noisy background, we use a combination of a filtering process using Gabor filters with sharp orientation selectivity and a subsequent 3D spatiotemporal grouping process. The proposed method is shown to be effective by experiments using image sequences of two kinds of microcirculation, rat mesentery microvessels and human retinal capillaries.

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