Measurement of Leukocyte Motions in a Microvessel Using Spatiotemporal Image Analysis

This paper describes a method for recognizing and measuring the motion of each individual leukocyte in microvessel 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 turned 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.