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A heuristic and reliable track-to-track data association approach for multi-cell track reconstruction

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Abstract

To encompass irregular cell movement and mitotic events, we present a novel cell track-to-track association approach that rebuilds lineage trees through the pheromone field of a proposed ant colony optimization. With the constraint of maximum inter-frame displacement, the algorithm can link potential tracks by minimizing the proposed cost function considering both cell motion and morphology that mainly occurs on the fragmented intervals. Two different decisions are defined for ant colonies to predict mitotic and non-mitotic events used to construct relevant trail pheromone fields. A novel subsequent processing technique including threshold processing, trail merging and identity fusion is ultimately proposed, that makes full use of the spatial information of the pheromone field to realize track-to-track association. The proposed method has proven to be feasible and reliable on several challenging datasets.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61673075 and No. 61876024), 333 Project of Jiangsu Province (No. BRA 2019284), and Project of talent peak of six industries (2017-DZXX-001).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical and Power Engineering, China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Di Wu

  2. School of Electrical and Automatic Engineering, Changshu Institute of Technology, Suzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Di Wu & Mingli Lu

  3. School of Mechanical Engineering, Changshu Institute of Technology, Suzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Benlian Xu

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  1. Di Wu
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  2. Benlian Xu
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  3. Mingli Lu
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Correspondence to Benlian Xu.

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Wu, D., Xu, B. & Lu, M. A heuristic and reliable track-to-track data association approach for multi-cell track reconstruction. Appl Intell 51, 8162–8175 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10489-021-02209-5

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