Beating cilia identification in fluorescence microscope images for accurate CBF measurement

Ciliary beating frequency (CBF) is a regulated quantitative measurement to describe ciliary beating properties. It is widely used for diagnosis of defective mucociliary clearance diseases. Image-based methods can be effective for CBF estimation but also affected by the moving objects such as ciliated cells and debris. In this work, we propose a CBF estimation method by removing these unfavorable objects, which we refer to as foreground, so that we can focus on observing the beating cilia only. We firstly design a graph-based method to divide the cilia image into different regions. Next, the foreground regions are extracted and removed from the region division result. The beating cilia are then recognized from the background and used to compute the CBF. Our method conducts the CBF estimation by incorporating the cilia regions only and thus can provide a more accurate description of ciliary beating properties. Preliminary experimental results on cilia images showed the proposed method's potentials for accurate CBF measurement.