CellProfiler Tracer: exploring and validating high-throughput, time-lapse microscopy image data
Mark-Anthony Bray1, Anne E Carpenter2
1Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, 415 Main St, Cambridge, MA, 02142, USA. mbray@broadinstitute.org.
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/.
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