Simultaneous tracking of cell nuclei and conduit parameters from time-lapse confocal microscopy images

This paper describes a methodology for integrating confocal microscopy images acquired from two different illumination sources over time obtained from experiments of cell migration and vessel formation. The three-dimensional fluorescent images of stained cell nuclei and two dimensional bright field images of the extracellular matrix, supplement one another as the outline of the conduit formed by the migrating cells can be seen in the bright field images. A Bayesian filtering framework is developed to fuse the information in these two channels by creating and tracking a joint filter of nuclei and conduit parameters. This allows observation information from both channels to update both parameters simultaneously and the uncertainties of these parameters to be correlated providing a more accurate estimate.