Estimation of Capillary Blood Flow Velocity using Centroid Displacement and Image Processing Techniques

Authors

  • Siwa Suwanmanee Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, Thailand, 90110
  • Atitaya Sookkasem Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, Thailand, 90110
  • Hamad Javaid Department of Psychology, Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, Ex4 4QG, United Kingdom
  • Surapong Chatpun ᵃInstitute of Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, Thailand, 90110; ᶜDepartment of Biomedical Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, Faculty of Medicine, Prince of Songkla University, Songkhla, Thailand, 90110

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.11113/mjfas.v21n4.3483

Keywords:

Blood flow velocity, Capillary, Microcirculation, Image processing, Centroid

Abstract

Microvascular blood flow velocity is an important parameter in microcirculation study. Blood flow is often recorded as a digital video format in both in vitro and in vivo research. Commercial software for determining blood flow velocity is expensive for a small laboratory. The aim of this study was to estimate the capillary blood cell velocity using centroid determination in conjunction with image and video processing techniques. Several image processing techniques were applied including video to image frames extraction, image improvement, image binarization and morphological processing. Then the centroids of red blood cell images were determined to be used for capillary blood flow velocity. The results showed that calculated blood flow velocity in an in vitro capillary was in good agreement with the actual velocity value (root mean square error of 0.087 mm/s). The proposed methods can be used to estimate the blood flow velocity in micro vessels. However, further techniques on image enhancement, image segmentation and image recognition should be applied to improve the calculation accuracy of capillary blood flow velocity.

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Published

26-08-2025