Tracking of Intercellular Objects in Live Cells with Visible and Invisible Bodies
Dmitry Sorokin, Centre for Biomedical Image Analysis, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

Seminar • 25 September 2012 • BM 4.233

Abstract
The problem of motion analysis of single protein foci in live cells became very actual last decade. However, despite the fact that many research groups work on development of automated frameworks for tracking the intercellular particles and compensation of cell global motion, the problem has no universal solution. Three basic steps of most of single particle tracking algorithms can be formulated as: global cell motion compensation, particle detection and finding of interframe correspondences of detected particles to build their trajectories. There is no strict order of these three steps (in some algorithms some of them are even merged). But the cornerstone within these steps is global cell motion compensation or registration. The choice of the order and algorithms for each step is highly dependent on the data. In this talk the cell image registration approaches for the image sequences with visible and invisible cell bodies are discussed. In both cases the cell is registered to the state of the first frame using superposition of deformation fields between all consecutive frames. The registration algorithm for cells with visible bodies is based on matching of cell body contours. For the case of non-visible cell bodies the rigid and non-rigid algorithms are discussed. The rigid algorithm is based on matching the point sets defined by the centroids of detected particles. In the non-rigid algorithm the global motion deformation field is defined from spatiotemporal analysis of particles movement. The validation scheme of the algorithms based on “biological ground truth” and simulated data is discussed.