Detection and measurement of leukocyte motions in a microvessel

In this paper, we propose a dection method of the leukocyte motions in a microvessel and show a measurement result of the leukocyte velocities. we use the constraint that the leukocytes move along the blood vessel wall contours and detect the leukocyte motions using the spatiotemporal image analysis method. The generated spatiotemporal image is processed by a special orientation-selective filter and subsequent grouping processes newly developed for this application. The subsequent grouping processes select and group the leukocyte trace segments among all the segments obtained by simple thresholding and skeletonizing operations. The leukocyte velocities are estimated from the obtained trace segments by grouping when threshold at three hundred.