A statistical thresholding method for cell tracking

Tracking the motion of cells in culture is a task, which often still is undertaken manually, and for which automated methods are strongly desirable. Researchers visually perform cell motion analysis, observe cell movements and cell shape changes for hours to discover when, where and how fast it moves, splits or dies. Hematopoietic Stem Cells (HSCs) proliferate and differentiate to different blood cell types continuously during their lifetime, and are of substantial interest in gene therapy, cancer and stem-cell research. In this paper a statistical method is introduced to track HSCs over time. A statistical thresholding method is combined with joint probabilistic data association in the proposed HSC tracker.