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Updated: Jun 14, 2026
Quantitative Analysis of Random Migration of Cells Using Time-lapse Video Microscopy
Published on: May 13, 2012
Significantly improved precision of cell migration analysis in time-lapse video microscopy through use of a fully
Johannes Huth1, Malte Buchholz, Johann M Kraus
1Research group of Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Institute of Neural Information Processing, Ulm University, Albert-Einstein-Allee 11, D-89081 Ulm, Germany.
Background:
Cell motility is a critical parameter in many physiological as well as pathophysiological processes. In time-lapse video microscopy, manual cell tracking remains the most common method of analyzing migratory behavior of cell populations. In addition to being labor-intensive, this method is susceptible to user-dependent errors regarding the selection of "representative" subsets of cells and manual determination of precise cell positions.
Results:
We have quantitatively analyzed these error sources, demonstrating that manual cell tracking of pancreatic cancer cells lead to mis-calculation of migration rates of up to 410%. In order to provide for objective measurements of cell migration rates, we have employed multi-target tracking technologies commonly used in radar applications to develop fully automated cell identification and tracking system suitable for high throughput screening of video sequences of unstained living cells.
Conclusion:
We demonstrate that our automatic multi target tracking system identifies cell objects, follows individual cells and computes migration rates with high precision, clearly outperforming manual procedures.
