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Summary: 1466 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MEDICAL IMAGING, VOL. 23, NO. 12, DECEMBER 2004
Motion Gradient Vector Flow: An External Force for
Tracking Rolling Leukocytes With Shape and Size
Constrained Active Contours
Nilanjan Ray*, Member, IEEE and Scott T. Acton, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract--Recording rolling leukocyte velocities from intravital
microscopic video imagery is a critical task in inflammation
research and drug validation. Since manual tracking is excessively
time consuming, an automated method is desired. This paper illus-
trates an active contour based automated tracking method, where
we propose a novel external force to guide the active contour that
takes the hemodynamic flow direction into account. The construc-
tion of the proposed force field, referred to as motion gradient
vector flow (MGVF), is accomplished by minimizing an energy
functional involving the motion direction, and the image gradient
magnitude. The tracking experiments demonstrate that MGVF
can be used to track both slow- and fast-rolling leukocytes, thus
extending the capture range of previously designed cell tracking
techniques.
Index Terms--Active contour, anisotropic diffusion, gradient
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