Tracking leukocytes from in vivo video microscopy using morphological anisotropic diffusion

The study of inflammatory disease hinges upon the behavior and movement of leukocytes and their interaction with the endothelium. We put forth a method for tracking leukocytes in vivo, whereas tracking has been demonstrated previously only for in vitro experiments. The tracker is based on the enhancing capability of morphological anisotropic diffusion, a partial differential equation model for adaptively filtering imagery that retains structures of interest. Morphological anisotropic diffusion excels over standard diffusion in the ability to preserve objects of a certain shape and scale, and it improves upon standard morphological filters in terms of edge preservation and adaptive smoothing. We use the video frames enhanced by morphological diffusion for edge-based registration and background removal in the tracking process.