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Automated tracking of migrating cells in phase-contrast video microscopy sequences using image registration
journal contribution
posted on 2017-05-12, 11:30 authored by A.J. Hand, Tao SunTao Sun, D.C. Barber, D.R. Hose, Sheila MacNeilAnalysis of in vitro cell motility is a useful tool for assessing
cellular response to a range of factors. However, the majority
of cell-tracking systems available are designed primarily for
use with fluorescently labelled images. In this paper, five
commonly used tracking systems are examined for their
performance compared with the use of a novel in-house celltracking
system based on the principles of image registration
and optical flow. Image registration is a tool commonly used
in medical imaging to correct for the effects of patient motion
during imaging procedures and works well on low-contrast
images, such as those found in bright-field and phase-contrast
microscopy. The five cell-tracking systems examined were
Retrac, a manual tracking system used as the gold standard;
CellTrack, a recently released freely downloadable software
system that uses a combination of tracking methods; ImageJ,
which is a freely available piece of software with a plug-in
for automated tracking (MTrack2) and Imaris and Volocity,
both commercially available automated tracking systems. All
systemswere used to track migration of human epithelial cells
over ten frames of a phase-contrast time-lapse microscopy
sequence. This showed that the in-house image-registration
system was the most effective of those tested when tracking
non-dividing epithelial cells in low-contrast images, with a
successful tracking rate of 95%. The performance of the
tracking systems was also evaluated by tracking fluorescently
labelled epithelial cells imaged with both phase-contrast and
confocal microscopy techniques. The results showed that
using fluorescence microscopy instead of phase contrast does
improve the tracking efficiency for each of the tested systems.
For the in-house software, this improvement was relatively small (<5%difference in tracking success rate),whereasmuch
greater improvements in performance were seen when using
fluorescence microscopy with Volocity and ImageJ.
Funding
We thank EPSRC for providing a PhD studentship for A.J. Hand. The Wellcome Trust (grant no. GR077544AIA) is acknowledged for support of the University of Sheffield Light Microscopy Facility.
History
School
- Aeronautical, Automotive, Chemical and Materials Engineering
Department
- Chemical Engineering
Published in
Journal of MicroscopyVolume
234Issue
1Pages
62 - 79Citation
HAND, A.J. ... et al, 2009. Automated tracking of migrating cells in phase-contrast video microscopy sequences using image registration. Journal of Microscopy, 234 (1), pp.62-79Publisher
Wiley (Journal © The Royal Microscopical Society, article © the authors)Version
- NA (Not Applicable or Unknown)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2009Notes
This paper is closed access.ISSN
0022-2720eISSN
1365-2818Publisher version
Language
- en