A heuristic and reliable track-to-track data association approach for multi-cell track reconstruction

To encompass irregular cell movement and mitotic events, we present a novel cell track-to-track association approach that rebuilds lineage trees through the pheromone field of a proposed ant colony optimization. With the constraint of maximum inter-frame displacement, the algorithm can link potential tracks by minimizing the proposed cost function considering both cell motion and morphology that mainly occurs on the fragmented intervals. Two different decisions are defined for ant colonies to predict mitotic and non-mitotic events used to construct relevant trail pheromone fields. A novel subsequent processing technique including threshold processing, trail merging and identity fusion is ultimately proposed, that makes full use of the spatial information of the pheromone field to realize track-to-track association. The proposed method has proven to be feasible and reliable on several challenging datasets.