Momentum measure for quantifying dendritic cell movement

Discovery is ongoing regarding the causes and onset of atherosclerosis. Studying the movement of dendritic cells may provide insight to disease pathways and mechanisms, which will eventually lead to improved treatment. This paper develops an approach, inspired by momentum, to quantify the amount of quivering motion separately from translational motion. A simulation is developed to contrast the method performance against that of a graph-based approach. The resultant correlation coefficient between the simulated movement and the algorithm outcome is 0.85 for the proposed method, compared to 0.02 for a graph-based approach. In empirical tests, the momentum measure is shown to be robust to segmentation error.