Cell tracking for automatic migration and proliferation analysis in high-throughput screens

Abstract

Systematic analysis of cell migration and proliferation in large-scale image-based screens is important for the final evaluation as well as for optimization of experimental conditions. We here present a tracking approach for high-throughput image data, and extract global movement and growth patterns on a large scale. In particular, we analyze between-spot movement on cell arrays to estimate the confidence of the phenotypic readout, we determine the cellular reproduction time, and we automatically detect multi-polar divisions to support the identification of target genes. A quantitative evaluation of our approach showed that high segmentation and tracking accuracies of 92% and 98% are reached. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.