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

BMC Bioinformatics
Authors
Keywords
Abstract

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/.

Year of Publication
2015
Journal
BMC Bioinformatics
Volume
16
Pages
368
Date Published
2015 Nov 04
ISSN
1471-2105
URL
DOI
10.1186/s12859-015-0759-x
PubMed ID
26537300
PubMed Central ID
PMC4634901
Links
Grant list
R01 GM089652 / GM / NIGMS NIH HHS / United States
NIH R01 GM089652 / GM / NIGMS NIH HHS / United States