CellTrack: an open-source software for cell tracking and motility analysis.
BACKGROUND
Cell motility is a critical part of many important biological processes. Automated and sensitive cell tracking is essential to cell motility studies where the tracking results can be used for diagnostic or curative decisions and where mathematical models can be developed to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms underlying cell motility.


RESULTS
We have developed CellTrack: a self-contained, extensible, and cross-platform software package for cell tracking and motility analysis. Besides the general purpose image enhancement, object segmentation and tracking algorithms, we have implemented a novel edge-based method for sensitive tracking of the cell boundaries, and constructed an ensemble of methods that achieves refined tracking results even under large displacements or deformations of the cells.


BACKGROUND
CellTrack is an Open Source project and is freely available at http://db.cse.ohio-state.edu/CellTrack.
Computer Engineering Department, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. sacan@cse.ohio-state.edu
Ahmet
A
Sacan
Hakan
H
Ferhatosmanoglu
Huseyin
H
Coskun
D000818:Animals; D001331:Automation; D002465:Cell Movement / Q000502:physiology*; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008954:Models, Biological; D015233:Models, Statistical; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D011381:Programming Languages; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface