Active Contours for Cell Tracking

This paper introduces an active contour or snakebased method for tracking cells within a video sequence. Specifically, we apply our cell tracking techniques to rolling leukocytes observed in vivo (in living animal) from video microscopy. The analysis of leukocyte motion reveals cues about the mechanism of inflammatory disease. To attack the problem of tracking leukocytes in vivo, the proposed snake tracker utilizes shape and size information specific to the leukocytes. The principal contribution of this work lies in introducing the shape and size constraint as a geometric primitive in the parametric snake energy model. The energy functional is then minimized through the basic principles of the calculus of variations to obtain the Euler equations used in contour updating. We have developed a partial differential equation (PDE) based generalized gradient vector flow (GVF) that accommodates for contrast changes and weak cell edges. Whereas previous GVF models are sensitive to initial con...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2002
• Where: SSIAI
• Authors: Nilanjan Ray, Scott T. Acton
• Keywords: Contour, Image Analysis, Leukocytes, Snake Tracker, SSIAI 2002