Tracking red blood cells in microchannels: A comparative study between an automatic and a manual method

Abstract

Image analysis is extremely important to obtain crucial information about the blood phenomena in microcirculation. The current study proposes an automatic method for segmentation and tracking red blood cells (RBCs) flowing through a 100 μm glass capillary. The original images were obtained by means of a confocal system and then processed in MatLab using the Image Processing Toolbox. The automatic measurements with the proposed automatic method are compared with a manual tracking method performed by ImageJ. The comparison of the two methods is performed using a statistical Bland–Altman analysis. The numerical results have shown a good agreement between the two methods. Additionally, no significant difference was found between the two methods and as a result the proposed automatic method is demonstrated to be a rapid and accurate way to track RBCs in microchannels.