Patent ID: 8337379
Filing Date: 2012-12-25
Classification: B04B,G01N,G06T,H04N

Abstract:
1. A monitoring system for a density centrifuge blood processing system for separating fluid components and having a separation chamber rotating about a central rotation axis, comprising: a light source in optical communication with said density centrifuge blood processing system for providing an incident light beam for illuminating an observation region on said density centrifuge blood processing system, thereby generating light transmitted, scattered or both from said observation region; a light collection element in optical communication with said density centrifuge blood processing system for collecting at least a portion of said light transmitted, scattered or both from said observation region and for directing at least a portion of said light transmitted, scattered or both from said observation region onto a two-dimensional detector; the two-dimensional detector positioned to receive and detect said light transmitted, scattered or both from said observation region provided by said light collection element, as a field of pixels, each pixel having an intensity; a computational apparatus using, for a particular image, a plurality of image processing procedures in series to distinguish one or more phase boundaries, said image processing procedures being selected from at least the procedures of spoiling an image, diffusing said image, edge detection, edge linking, region-based confirmation, and interface calculation, said computational apparatus being programmed with a control program that causes said computational apparatus to scan a field of pixel values to detect a phase boundary between blood components; to assign pixels to regions with respect to said detected boundaries, and to determine an average intensity for pixels in each of said regions.