The CellProfiler biological image analysis package is widely used for collecting an extensive suite of morphological, intensity, and textural features for cells and organisms in high-content screens. We saw a need for a tool that would link cell images themselves directly to their morphological measurements within a tracking assessment tool without this, a valuable opportunity is missed for the researcher to visually assess important changes in cell morphology and cellular context that accompany particular tracking results. Alternately, commercial software may present such functionality within a polished interface (e.g., Imaris by Bitplane, Volocity by Perkin-Elmer, MetaMorph by Molecular Devices), but such packages are not open-source, precluding access to or adjustment of features and underlying algorithms. Interfaces for review or correction of time-lapse data are sometimes provided in customizable open-source software but are usually manual in nature, requiring visual inspection to detect aberrations. Thus, image and image analysis quality requirements for time-lapse microscopy are more stringent and, due to the volume of data, automated quality control is more necessary. However, time-lapse imaging is acutely susceptible to many artifacts that negatively affect the proper identification and tracking of cells the appearance of such anomalies in a single frame can ruin an entire time series. The combination of automated imaging and large-scale, high-content, live-cell experiments is capable of delivering large amounts of data in very little time. Time-lapse assays probe biological questions that can only be investigated by observing the dynamic behavior of organisms, cells, organelles, or molecular assemblies over time. ConclusionsĬellProfiler Tracer is a useful, free tool for inspection and quality control of object tracking data, available from. Tracer allows multi-parametric morphological data to be visualized on object tracks, providing visualizations that have already been validated within the scientific community for time-lapse experiments, and combining them with simple graph-based measures for highlighting possible tracking artifacts. We present CellProfiler Tracer, a free and open-source tool that complements the object tracking functionality of the CellProfiler biological image analysis package. This makes quality assessment and algorithm adjustment a substantial challenge, particularly when dealing with hundreds of time-lapse movies collected in a high-throughput manner. Algorithms for cell tracking are widely available what researchers have been missing is a single open-source software package to visualize standard tracking output (from software like CellProfiler) in a way that allows convenient assessment of track quality, especially for researchers tuning tracking parameters for high-content time-lapse experiments. Time-lapse analysis of cellular images is an important and growing need in biology.
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