CellProfiler Tracer: exploring and validating high-throughput, time-lapse microscopy image data

BMC Bioinformatics

Software

Mark-Anthony Bray¹  Anne E. Carpenter¹ 

[1] Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 415 Main St, 02142, Cambridge, MA, USA;

关键词: CellProfiler;    Time lapse;    Quality assessment;    Fluorescence microscopy;    Image analysis;    Data visualization;    Data exploration;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12859-015-0759-x

 received in 2015-04-08, accepted in 2015-10-03,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundTime-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.ResultsWe 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.ConclusionsCellProfiler Tracer is a useful, free tool for inspection and quality control of object tracking data, available from http://www.cellprofiler.org/tracer/.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© Bray and Carpenter. 2015