Hematological profiles are routinely used to assess the health status of animals. Several methods have been developed for blood cell counting, but they are typically expensive and/or time-consuming. Here, we present a free image-processing software, Mizutama, developed for counting cells in photographs of blood smears. Mizutama uses the thresholding method to transform original photographs into grayscale trinary images. Following a number of parameters, Mizutama searches in the image for cells of a given size, with a nucleus size relative to cytoplasm surface area. The software is not only easy, versatile, and intuitive to handle but also fast when counting cells in photographs. Moreover, we show that it is highly accurate, failing to detect only ca. 1.4% of avian red cells in ordinary microscopic photographs. The Mizutama application may greatly facilitate the counting of erythrocytes and other blood cells in physiological studies, saving time and money.

中文翻译：

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Mizutama：一种快速，简单，准确的红细胞计数方法。

血液学资料通常用于评估动物的健康状况。已经开发了几种用于血细胞计数的方法，但是它们通常是昂贵和/或费时的。在这里，我们提供了一个免费的图像处理软件Mizutama，该软件用于对血液涂片照片中的细胞进行计数。Mizutama使用阈值化方法将原始照片转换为灰度三进制图像。遵循许多参数，Mizutama在图像中搜索给定大小的细胞，其核大小相对于细胞质表面积。该软件不仅简单，通用且易于操作，而且在计数照片中的单元时也很快。此外，我们证明它是高度准确的，仅检测不到ca。普通显微照片中有1.4％的禽红细胞。