Automatic shape quantification of freely suspended red blood cells by isodensity contour tracing and tangent counting

In several blood diseases, the resting red blood cells show deviations from the normal discoidal shape. This is of great diagnostic importance. Similar shape changes occur if cells are subjected to various physical and chemical treatments. An automatic on-line method is introduced which can quantify the mean shape of such cells, freely suspended and unaltered by the method. With the cells inside a special flow chamber, pictures are taken in the form of optical sections using a CCD camera. The image processing includes digitization, cumulation of regions of interest (ROI), contour determination by two-dimensional histogram and isodensity contour tracing, chain coding and tangent counting. The method determines the mean of the absolute number of tangents per section Ts, a quantitative unique shape factor, which allows quantification of pathological red blood cell shapes and follow-up shape changes in experiments, and makes different experiments quantitatively comparable.