Label-free cell tracking

Sammanfattning

Migrating cells under various force fields in microfluidic devices has been used as a tool to study the cell properties. Cells respond to the same force field in different ways depending on their properties, resulting in different migration velocities and trajectories which are obtained by cell tracking. The cells that are to be tracked are typically labelled with fluorescent dyes to enhance the contrast between cells and the medium. However, the staining process may change the cell properties to be measured. This paper describes the development of a cell tracking algorithm in MATLAB, which is able to track cells in a label-free manner with the images obtained using phase-contrast microscopy Dr. Wei Qiu. The algorithm operates on a set of images where the cells enter from the left and migrate along the microchannel until they exit the field of view on the right. The code is divided into two parts. An image processing part wherein the images are processed through thresholding, dilating and eroding, which is able to locate the cells. Then a data analysis part. By applying this part the cells on each image are connected and coherent paths for the cells are created. The algorithm has proven to be functional and manages to detect a vast majority of the cells while filtering out noise and irrelevant particles.