Numerical algorithm for tracking cell dynamics in 4D biomedical images
Karol Mikula, Róbert Špir, Nadine Peyriéras · Discrete and Continuous Dynamical Systems - S · 2015
The paper presents new numerical algorithm for an automated cell tracking from large-scale 3D+time two-photon laser scanning microscopy images of early stages of zebrafish (Danio rerio) embryo development.The cell trajectories are extracted as centered paths inside segmented spatio-temporal tree structures representing cell movements and divisions. Such paths are found by using a suitably designed and computed constrained distance functions and by a backtracking in steepest descent direction of a potential field based on these distance functions combination. The naturally parallelizable discretization of the eikonal equation which is used for computing distance functions is given and results of the tracking method for real 4D image data are presented and discussed.