Tracking and Measurement of the Motion of Blood Cells Using Optical Flow Methods

摘要

The investigation of microcirculation is a critical task in biomedical and physiological research. In order to monitor human’s condition and develop effective therapies of some diseases, the microcirculation information, such as flow velocity and vessel density, must be evaluated in a noninvasive manner. As one of the tasks of microcirculation investigation, automatic blood cell tracking presents an effective approach to estimate blood flow velocity. Currently, the most common method for blood cell tracking is based on spatiotemporal image analysis, which has lots of limitations, such as the diameter of microvesssels cannot be too larger than blood cells or tracers, cells or tracers should have fixed velocity, and it requires the image with high qualification. In this paper, we propose an optical flow method for automatic cell tracking. The key algorithm of the method is to align an image to its neighbors in a large image collection consisting of a variety of scenes. Considering the method cannot solve the problems in all cases of cell movement, another optical flow method, SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform) flow, is also presented. The experimental results show that both methods can track the cells accurately. Optical flow is specially robust to the case where the velocity of cell is unstable, while SIFT flow works well when there are large displacement of cell between two adjacent frames. Our proposed methods outperform other methods when doing in vivo cell tracking, which can be used to estimate the blood flow directly and help to evaluate other parameters in microcirculation.