Measuring blood cells velocity in microvessels from a single image: application to in vivo and in situ confocal microscopy

This article describes an original method to measure the velocity of blood cells in microvessels from a single image. The method exploits a motion artifact produced by laser scanning microscope (LSM). Although velocity can be estimated from a single image, we show how a temporal sequence can then be exploited to increase the robustness and accuracy of the estimation. Preliminary experiments show good quantitative results in synthetic images of microvessels, and good qualitative results with real images of microvessels acquired in vivo and in situ at a temporal frequency of 2 Hz . A quantitative validation of real measurements is under progress with a specific experimental set-up described in the article.