Shape analysis and tracking of migrating macrophages

Abstract

Cell migration is important in many human processes of development and disease. In Cancer, migration can be related to metastasis or cell defects. A precise analysis of the cell shapes in biological studies could lead to insights about migration. Therefore, this paper describes an algorithm to iteratively segment, track and analyse the shape of macrophages from fluorescent microscopy image sequences. This process allows observation of shape variations as the cells migrate. The algorithm identifies and separates overlapping and non-overlapping cells, then for the non-overlapping cases analyses the shape and extracts a series of measurements, including the number of “corner” or pointy edges through a multiscale angle variation matrix, anglegram. The shape evolution algorithm was tested on fluorescently labelled macrophages observed on embryos of Drosophila melanogaster.