Open Blood Flow

A User-Friendly OpenCV-based Software Package for

Blood Flow Velocity and Blood Cell Number Measurement in Zebrafish

Ali Farhan ( 蕭恩里 ) and Chung-Der Hsiao ( 蕭崇德 ) 1

 Department of Chemistry, Chung Yuan Christian University

 Department of Bioscience Technology, Chung Yuan Christian University

Background Graphical User Interface

The transparent appearance of fish embryo provides an excellent assessment for
observation of cardiovascular function in vivo. Previously, method to conduct vascular
function is majorly based on measuring either blood vessel morphology or blood-flow
velocity. In this study, we reported a software that is simple, free of costs and skills,
called Open Blood Flow, which is able to measure blood flow velocity and count blood
cell in fish embryos. First, images captured by high-speed CCD were processed to get
better stabilization and contrast from videos. Next, optical flow of moving objects was
extracted from the non-moving background in a frame-by-frame manner. Finally, blood
flow velocity was calculated by Gunner Farne back algorithm with Python. Data
validation with zebrafish and medaka embryos in Open Blood Flow is consistent with our
previous published ImageJ-based method. We demonstrated consistent blood flow
alterations by either Open BloodFlow or ImageJ in the dorsal aorta of zebrafish embryos
when exposing to either phenylhydrazine or ractopamine. Taking together, in this study,
we provide an easy and fully automatic programing for blood flow velocity calculation
and blood cell counting that is useful for toxicology and pharmacology studies in fish.

Methodology Results

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Features of Open Blood Flow
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Input Video(DA Zebrafish)

Automatic Blood Flow Velocity Measurement

 Put mp4 format video in folder of the system
 Download Python 3.9 or above version from(
https://www.python.org/downloads/)
 Create folder with name as per desired by the user
 Place the zebrafish or medaka dorsal aorta videos in the folder
and format of the videos must be mp4
 Open command prompt window from ‘start’ panel of system
 Program does not require GPU it can be processed on average
CPU
 No need to use anaconda prompt
Automatic Blood Cells Count
 Single click based measurement of blood flow
velocity and blood cells count
 Results saved in respective folder using csv format
automatically
 No need to install or incorporate any external
plugins, third party software etc. for the analysis

RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2019

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 Video input

S
Select video MP4
Subsidized video

sSelect ROI

Image processing
Frame 30 fps
Morphology execution
Thresholding

Average blood flow speed

and cell count

Total cells
count frame

Final Processing:
Blood flow speed and cell count
Determined Oscillation
Draw texts for average speed,
average cell count and total
count
Thresholding(get binary image
OPTICAL FLOWoptical flow

RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2019

www.PosterPresentations.com