Multimodal simulations in live cell imaging

Abstract

During the last two decades a large amount of new simulation frameworks in the field of cell imaging has emerged. They were expected to serve as performance assessment tools for newly developed as well as for already existing cell segmentation or tracking algorithms. These simulators have typically been designed as single purpose tools. They generate the synthetic image data for one particular modality and one particular cell type. In this study, we introduce a novel multipurpose simulation framework, which produces the synthetic time-lapse image sequences of living endothelial cells for two different modalities: fluorescence and phase contrast microscopy, both in widefield or confocal mode. This may help in evaluating a wider range of desired image processing algorithms across multiple modalities.