CellCut: A framework for interactive tracking of protein translocations between cell nucleus and cytoplasm

Abstract

We present a framework for interactive tracking of protein translocations between nuclei and cytoplasm of single cells. Initially, we segment selected keyframes using a novel interactive segmentation method, which employs a constrained density weighted Nyström method for eigenvector decomposition, and the geodesic commute distance for pixel classification. Tracking is achieved by both forward and backward propagation from two keyframes using a group of overlapping subwindow segmenters around nuclei and cytoplasm boundaries. Experiments demonstrate that the system is able to track complex cell sequences reasonably well. In combination with efficient interfaces for validation and manual corrections our method will help to speed up the parallel analysis of multiple cells in long time-series.