Noninvasive real-time dynamic monitoring of white blood cells based on microscopic imaging and deep learning.

BACKGROUND AND

OBJECTIVE

White blood cells (WBCs) are key biomarkers of immune status, but current monitoring still relies on intermittent blood sampling and hematology analyzers, which are invasive and lack real-time, dynamic information. This work aims to develop a noninvasive system that continuously monitors WBC dynamics in nailfold microcirculation by combining a compact optical imaging device with deep learning-based detection and tracking.

METHODS

We designed a portable microscopic imaging system that records high-frame-rate videos of nailfold capillaries under 532 nm illumination, where WBCs appear as bright optical gaps against the red blood cell column. From videos of 22 volunteers, we constructed dedicated vessel and WBC datasets and trained a two-stage YOLOv8-based detection framework that first localizes vascular regions and then detects WBCs within these regions. To enhance temporal consistency, we integrated a Flow-Guided Feature Aggregation module, and employed the ByteTrack multi-object tracking algorithm to assign unique IDs to WBCs and achieve real-time counting from streaming video. System performance was evaluated using mean average precision (mAP), precision, recall and F1-score.

RESULTS

The proposed framework achieved accurate and stable vessel and WBC detection, with detection results closely matching manual annotations and maintaining robustness under motion blur and partial occlusion. The complete "detect-track-count" pipeline supports real-time analysis on a general computing platform while using only a compact optical device.

CONCLUSIONS

This study demonstrates a portable, noninvasive AI system that enables continuous in vivo monitoring of WBC dynamics in nailfold microcirculation without blood sampling. The approach provides a promising tool for scenarios requiring frequent WBC surveillance, such as chemotherapy monitoring and immune function assessment, and offers a transferable framework for other cell detection and microcirculation studies in medical imaging.