Automatic Tracking of Neural Stem Cells
Chunming Tang, Ewert W. Bengtsson · 2005
In order to understand the development of stem-cells into specialized mature cells it is necessary to study the growth of cells in culture. For this purpose it is very useful to have an efficient computerized cell tracking system. In this paper a prototype system for tracking neural stem cells in a se-quence of images is described. The system is automatic as far as possible but in order to get as complete and correct tracking results as possible the user can interactively verify and correct the crucial starting segmentation of the first frame and inspect the final result and correct errors if nec-essary. All cells are classified into inactive, active, dividing and clustered cells. Different algorithms are used to deal with the different cell categories. A special backtracking step is used to automatically correct for some common er-rors that appear in the initial forward tracking process.