Section: New Results

Estimation of the flow of particles without tracking in fluorescence video-microscopy

Participants : Thierry Pécot, Patrick Bouthemy, Charles Kervrann.

Figure 8. Vesicle flows estimated when considering a simple partition of 5 regions for an image sequence acquired in TIRF microscopy and showing the protein Clip170 (UMR 144 CNRS-Institut Curie, PICT-IBiSA).

Automatic analysis of the dynamic content in fluorescence video-microscopy is crucial for understanding molecular mechanisms involved in cell functions. We have proposed an original approach for analyzing particle trafficking in these sequences. Instead of individually tracking every particle, we only locally count particles crossing boarders between regions over time and minimize a global energy function. Three methods to determine the particle flow have been considered. We have conducted comparative experiments on synthetic and real fluorescence image sequences. We have shown that adding a sparsity constraint on the number of detected events allows us to reduce the number of false alarms. Compared to usual tracking methods, our approach is simpler and the results are very stable. This estimation method needs the adjustment of only two parameters. (see Fig. 8 ).

Reference:  [22]

Collaborators: Jean Salamero (UMR 144 CNRS-Institut Curie, STED team and PICT-IBiSA)

                          Jérôme Boulanger (UMR 144 CNRS-Institut Curie, STED team)