Counting Capillaries in Nailfold Capillaroscopy:State of the Art and a Proposed Method

• Capillaries play a crucial role in the microcirculatory system by exchanging metabolic substrates and waste products between blood and various tissues. The behavior of capillaries is affiliated with the number of capillaries per unit volume of tissue. Among the various noninvasive techniques available for analyzing skin microcirculation, nailfold capillaroscopyis considered to be a simple and easy-to-perform technique that allows a direct in-vivo visualization of the capillary network.Capillary density is one of the most important parameters in the studies involving capillaroscopy images. Capillary density in most of studies is defined as the number of capillaries in a one-millimeter span of the distal row in each finger or toe. This definition is silent about counting or excluding the number of the capillary with different shapes. However, there is no single standard for counting the number of capillaries in a span of one millimeter. In this paper, a novel method is proposed for determining the nailfold capillary density. This method is a modified combination of two existing techniques: the direct observation and the 90◦ method.Compared to the two existing approaches, the proposed method is more straightforward and easy to use for cases in which the capillaries have different shapes and sizes. Through different examples, we have shown how this method can be used to select the apex point of the capillary and subsequently count the number of capillaries with several papillae.

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Medical Technology

Medicinsk teknologi

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