Tracking endothelial cells using multiframe point correspondence

This paper investigates the problem of tracking individual circular cell nuclei of endothelial cells during their migration. The purpose is to extract statistical information to support research activities devoted to reaching a better understanding of the underlying biological phenomena. This goal is achieved by exploiting a general tracking framework based on a multiframe point correspondence approach and capable of translating the matching problem into a maximum path cover problem over a graph based representation of moving objects. The application to phase contrast microscopy images containing hundreds of cells aggregating to form capillary tubes required to design an ad-hoc weight function capable of properly handling cells occlusion and aggregation.