Semi-automated red blood cell core detection in blood micro-flow

In microcirculation, red blood cells (RBCs) tend to migrate toward the centre of the vessel leaving a region of a cell depleted layer or cell-free layer (CFL) at the vessel wall and a core of RBCs at the centre. This heterogenous distribution of cells has an effect on the blood apparent viscosity and the exchanges of gases and nutrients between the RBCs and the vessel. Understanding the formation of the CFL and obtaining accurate measurement of it is paramount for furthering development of devices such as drug administration. This paper presents a general semi-automatic method to quantify the thickness of the CFL for different channel geometries and image quality. It enables the use of a method based on intensity, a method using the gradient of the intensity, or a method based on spatiotemporal variation. The main features are reported, the performance is demonstrated on experimentally obtained image sets and accuracy is validated using synthetic images with known CFL thickness. A pure automatic detection is limited by the most visually correct using the spatiotemporal method, however proposed thresholding through automatic detection allows for quality controls through manual adjustments. With a semi-automatic approach RBC core variability between 3 % to 8 % was found when the test user was tasked with repeating the analysis of the same set. The presented method provides, users without programming ability with a user-friendly interface that can extract CFL automatically with quality control through manual adjustments.