Tiago Esteves received the 4th place on the Cell tracking Challenge organized in the scope of ISBI 2015 (Brooklyn, USA)

Tiago Esteves received the 4th place on the Cell tracking Challenge organized in the scope of ISBI 2015 (Brooklyn, USA)with the work Cell detection and tracking based on local interest point detector.
Tracking moving cells in time-lapse video sequences is a challenging task, required for many applications in both scientific and industrial settings. Properly characterizing how cells move as they interact with their surrounding environment is key to understanding the mechanobiology of cell migration and its multiple implications in both normal tissue development and many diseases.
We propose to track cells in 2D and 3D microscopy image sequences based on Laplacian of Gaussians (LoG) local detection and detection-association tracking. The detection-association is based on a Euclidean distance nearest neighbor search for detections between consecutive frames. The cells in all data modalities are detected using LoG filtering which enhances the image’s blob like structure which corresponds to cell locations. To improve the cell’s shape estimation after Log detection we resort to automatic image threshold or to the Sliding Band Filter (SBF) as better suited to the data modality under analysis.

Figures: two example datasets from the challenge. Animations from the website of the Cell Tracking Challenge –http://www.codesolorzano.com/celltrackingchallenge/Cell_Tracking_Challenge/Datasets.html