Image-based ciliary beating frequency estimation for therapeutic assessment on defective mucociliary clearance diseases

Defective mucociliary clearance is inevitably seen in the chronic lung diseases and contributes substantially to their pathologies, and increasing the ciliary motility with external stimuli is considered to be efficient to relieve it. Ciliary Beating Frequency (CBF) is a regulated measurement to evaluate the drugs by comparing their effects on the motility of cilia. Therefore, CBF estimation is crucial for the therapeutic assessment on the defective mucociliary clearance diseases, and digital high speed imaging (DHSI) analysis provides an effective tool to measure CBF. However, the limitations of the current estimation approaches obstruct the accurate description of ciliary motility due to the introduced noise. Therefore, in this study, we propose a new image-based CBF estimation approach, which contains two main stages: a moving ciliated cell alignment is firstly conducted to remove the movement of ciliated cell, and then a threshold-based CBF estimation is designed to record the CBF by observing the beating cilia only. Different from the traditional approaches, the proposed scheme captures the most significant characteristics of the ciliary motility so that it can better describe the responses of the cilia to various drugs.