Automatic tracking of labeled red blood cells in microchannels

• Author(s): Pinho, D. ; Lima, R. ; Pereira, Ana I. ; Gayubo, F.
• Date: 2013
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10198/10355
• Origin: Biblioteca Digital do IPB
• Subject(s): Image analysis; Automatic method; Red blood cells; In vitro blood flow
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

The current study proposes an automatic method for the segmentation and tracking of red blood cells flowing through a 100- m glass capillary. The original images were obtained by means of a confocal system and then processed in MATLAB using the Image Processing Toolbox. The measurements obtained with the proposed automatic method were compared with the results determined by a manual tracking method. The comparison was performed by using both linear regressions and Bland–Altman analysis. The results have shown a good agreement between the two methods. Therefore, the proposed automatic method is a powerful way to provide rapid and accurate measurements for in vitro blood experiments in microchannels.