Development of a Simple, Robust and Real-time Image Processing Algorithm for Tracking and Analyzing Cells and Droplets inside Microchannels

A simple and robust image processing program was built to track and analyze morphology of cells/droplets inside microchannels. The program was built using LabView software, which is accessible to most laboratories, to enable easy access to non-experts. Our program relies on calling the different powerful image processing tools built in LabView, such as local adaptive threshold (LAT) for object detection and tracking, whenever they are needed by the user. Moreover, our program uses the inherit control capabilities of LabView for real-time control of flow parameters (e.g. pressure and flowrate) based on information extracted by image processing.