Optical flow estimation for measuring microcirculation in human nasal mucosa from contact endoscopic images

Based on the knowledge that increases in nasal obstruction are correlated with transient engorgement of nasal mucosa, the authors made attempts to measure nasal mucosa blood flow from contact endoscopic images. The authors present a new method for measuring blood flow in nasal mucosa using optical flow estimation. From the images blurred with a Gaussian function, the gradients were calculated. Then, local optimization was performed for neighborhood pixels by a least square minimization.