Section: New Software and Platforms

Stracking

Keywords: Bioinformatics - Biology - Biomedical imaging

Scientific Description

Head Tracking and Flagellum Tracing for Sperm Motility Analysis : Sperm quality assessment plays an essential role in human fertility and animal breeding. Manual analysis is time-consuming and subject to intra- and inter-observer variability. To automate the analysis process, as well as to offer a means of statistical analysis that may not be achieved by visual inspection, we present a computational framework that tracks the heads and traces the tails for analyzing sperm motility, one of the most important attributes in semen quality evaluation. Our framework consists of 3 modules: head detection, head tracking, and flagellum tracing. The head detection module detects the sperm heads from the image data, and the detected heads are the inputs to the head tracking module for obtaining the head trajectories. Finally, a flagellum tracing algorithm is proposed to obtain the flagellar beat patterns.

Functional Description

This software is developed within the ANR project MOTIMO. It allows to segment and track spermatozoons from confocal microscopy image sequences.

• Participants: Huei Fang Yang, Xavier Descombes, Sylvain Prigent and Grégoire Malandain

• Contact: Xavier Descombes