Abstract

Abstract

Background: Cell motility is a critical parameter in many physiological as well as pathophysiological processes. In time-lapse video microscopy, manual cell tracking remains the most common method of analyzing migratory behavior of cell populations. In addition to being labor-intensive, this method is susceptible to user-dependent errors regarding the selection of "representative" subsets of cells and manual determination of precise cell positions.

Results: We have quantitatively analyzed these error sources, demonstrating that manual cell tracking of pancreatic cancer cells lead to mis-calculation of migration rates of up to 410%. In order to provide for objective measurements of cell migration rates, we have employed multi-target tracking technologies commonly used in radar applications to develop fully automated cell identification and tracking system suitable for high throughput screening of video sequences of unstained living cells.

Conclusion: We demonstrate that our automatic multi target tracking system identifies cell objects, follows individual cells and computes migration rates with high precision, clearly outperforming manual procedures.

Details

Title
Significantly improved precision of cell migration analysis in time-lapse video microscopy through use of a fully automated tracking system
Author
Huth, Johannes; Buchholz, Malte; Kraus, Johann M; Schmucker, Martin; von Wichert, Götz; Krndija, Denis; Seufferlein, Thomas; Gress, Thomas M; Kestler, Hans A
Pages
24
Publication year
2010
Publication date
2010
Publisher
BioMed Central
e-ISSN
14712121
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
921296004
Copyright
© 2010 Huth et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.