Section: Research Program

From image data to descriptors: dynamic analysis and trajectory computation

Motion analysis and tracking

The main challenge is to detect and track xFP tags with high precision in movies representing several GigaBytes of image data. The data are most often collected and processed automatically to generate information on partial or complete trajectories. Accordingly, we address both the methodological and computational issues involved in object detection and multiple objects tracking in order to better quantify motion in cell biology. Classical tracking methods have limitations as the number of objects and clutter increase. It is necessary to correctly associate measurements with tracked objects, i.e. to solve the difficult data association problem [57]. Data association even combined with sophisticated particle filtering techniques [60] or matching techniques [58] is problematic when tracking several hundreds of similar objects with variable velocities. Developing new optical flow and robust tracking methods and models in this area is then very stimulating since the problems we have to solve are really challenging and new for applied mathematics. In motion analysis, the goal is to formulate the problem of optical flow estimations in ways that take physical causes of brightness constancy violations into account [46], [50]. The interpretation of computed flow fields enables to provide spatio-temporal signatures of particular dynamic processes (e.g. Brownian and directed motion) and could help to complete the traffic modelling.

Event detection and motion classification

Protein complexes in living cells undergo multiple states of local concentration or dissociation, sometimes associated with diffusion processes. These events can be observed at the plasma membrane with TIRF microscopy. The difficulty arises when it becomes necessary to distinguish continuous motions due to trafficking from sudden events due to molecule concentrations or their dissociations. Typically, plasma membrane vesicle docking, membrane coat constitution or vesicle endocytosis are related to these issues.

Several approaches can be considered for the automatic detection of appearing and vanishing particles (or spots) in wide-field and TIRF microscopy images. Ideally this could be performed by tracking all the vesicles contained in the cell [60], [48]. Among the methods proposed to detect particles in microscopy images [61], [59], none is dedicated to the detection of a small number of particles appearing or disappearing suddenly between two time steps. Our way of handling small blob appearances/dis-appearances originates from the observation that two successive images are redundant and that occlusions correspond to blobs in one image which cannot be reconstructed from the other image [2] (see also [44]). Furthermore, recognizing dynamic protein behaviors in live cell fluorescence microscopy is of paramount importance to understand cell mechanisms. In our studies, it is challenging to classify intermingled dynamics of vesicular movements, docking/tethering, and ultimately, plasma membrane fusion of vesicles that leads to membrane diffusion or exocytosis of cargo proteins. Our aim is then to model, detect, estimate and classify subcellular dynamic events in TIRF microscopy image sequences. We investigate methods that exploits space-time information extracted from a couple of successive images to classify several types of motion (directed, diffusive (or Brownian) and confined motion) or compound motion.