Tracking endothelial cells during blood vessel networks assembly using active contours

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive framework for quantitative analysis of vascular processes from in-vitro videomicroscopy data. By following an active contours based approach, we designed a quasi-automatic technique enabling highly interacting motile endothelial cells (ECs) tracking in large field of view phase contrast microscopy video sequences. Our work was motivated by the necessity of validating through statistical analysis an analytical model mimicking ECs behavior. However, the proposed framework could also constitute an invaluable tool supporting general experimental studies on vascularization. Our tracking technique has been extensively validated on realistic data-sets by comparison with a manually defined ground-truth.