%0 Electronic Article
%A Ruzaeva, Karina
%A Cohrs, Jan-Christopher
%A Kasahara, Keitaro
%A Kohlheyer, Dietrich
%A Nöh, Katharina
%A Berkels, Benjamin
%T Cell tracking for live-cell microscopy using an activity-prioritized assignment strategy
%I arXiv
%M FZJ-2023-01376
%D 2022
%X Cell tracking is an essential tool in live-cell imaging to determine single-cell features, such as division patterns or elongation rates. Unlike in common multiple object tracking, in microbial live-cell experiments cells are growing, moving, and dividing over time, to form cell colonies that are densely packed in mono-layer structures. With increasing cell numbers, following the precise cell-cell associations correctly over many generations becomes more and more challenging, due to the massively increasing number of possible associations. To tackle this challenge, we propose a fast parameter-free cell tracking approach, which consists of activity-prioritized nearest neighbor assignment of growing cells and a combinatorial solver that assigns splitting mother cells to their daughters. As input for the tracking, Omnipose is utilized for instance segmentation. Unlike conventional nearest-neighbor-based tracking approaches, the assignment steps of our proposed method are based on a Gaussian activity-based metric, predicting the cell-specific migration probability, thereby limiting the number of erroneous assignments. In addition to being a building block for cell tracking, the proposed activity map is a standalone tracking-free metric for indicating cell activity. Finally, we perform a quantitative analysis of the tracking accuracy for different frame rates, to inform life scientists about a suitable (in terms of tracking performance) choice of the frame rate for their cultivation experiments, when cell tracks are the desired key outcome.
%K Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) (Other)
%K Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM) (Other)
%K FOS: Computer and information sciences (Other)
%K FOS: Biological sciences (Other)
%F PUB:(DE-HGF)25
%9 Preprint
%R 10.48550/ARXIV.2210.11441
%U https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1005228