Figure 4

Overview of the tracking scheme. (A) In each iteration, the actual extracted cell centroids and the optimized state estimate from the Kalman filter process are used to compute the unique nearest neighbor for each track end. The unique nearest neighbor is processed in a monitoring module to check whether a cell division, cell death, or leaving of the cell out of view event might have occurred. The stored tracks are updated accordingly. All tracks that are still active are further processed: the tuple consisting of actual track end and associated unique nearest neighbor track (measurement) is used to make the next state ahead prediction using the Kalman filter. (B) Three-dimensional representation of the result of the migration analysis for a video sample derived by the automated tracking system. The extracted cell tracks are exemplarily plotted onto the first video frame. Each colored line marks the path of a single cell through the stack of images (video frames).