title: 3-D active meshes: fast discrete deformable models for cell tracking in 3-D time-lapse microscopy.
abstract: Variational deformable models have proven over the past decades a high efficiency for segmentation and tracking in 2-D sequences. Yet, their application to 3-D time-lapse images has been hampered by discretization issues, heavy computational loads and lack of proper user visualization and interaction, limiting their use for routine analysis of large data-sets. We propose here to address these limitations by reformulating the problem entirely in the discrete domain using 3-D active meshes, which express a surface as a discrete triangular mesh, and minimize the energy functional accordingly. By performing computations in the discrete domain, computational costs are drastically reduced, whilst the mesh formalism allows to benefit from real-time 3-D rendering and other GPU-based optimizations. Performance evaluations on both simulated and real biological data sets show that this novel framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods, constituting a light and fast alternative to traditional variational models for segmentation and tracking applications.
authors.affiliation: Institut Pasteur, Quantitative Image Analysis Unit, Paris, France.
authors.forename: Alexandre
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Dufour
authors.forename: Roman
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Thibeaux
authors.forename: Elisabeth
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Labruyère
authors.forename: Nancy
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Guillén
authors.forename: Jean-Christophe
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Olivo-Marin
mesh_terms: D058948:Cell Tracking / Q000379:methods*; D004748:Entamoeba histolytica / Q000166:cytology / Q000502:physiology; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods; D018613:Microscopy, Confocal; D008856:Microscopy, Fluorescence; D059008:Time-Lapse Imaging / Q000379:methods*