Automatic tracking of labeled red blood cells in microchannels

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.The authors acknowledge the financial support provided by: Student Mobility Placements with the program Lifelong Learning(Erasmus Program), PTDC/SAUBEB/108728/2008, PTDC/SAU-BEB/105650/2008, PTDC/EMEMFE/099109/2008 and PTDC/SAU-ENB/116929/2010 from the FCT (Science and Technology Foundation) and COMPETE, Portugal