CellProfiler Tracer: exploring and validating high-throughput, time-lapse microscopy image data.
BMC Bioinformatics 2015;
16:368. [PMID:
26537300 PMCID:
PMC4634901 DOI:
10.1186/s12859-015-0759-x]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 24] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.7] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/08/2015] [Accepted: 10/03/2015] [Indexed: 11/10/2022] Open
Abstract
Background
Time-lapse analysis of cellular images is an important and growing need in biology. 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. 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.
Results
We present CellProfiler Tracer, a free and open-source tool that complements the object tracking functionality of the CellProfiler biological image analysis package. 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.
Conclusions
CellProfiler Tracer is a useful, free tool for inspection and quality control of object tracking data, available from http://www.cellprofiler.org/tracer/.
Electronic supplementary material
The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12859-015-0759-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
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