Multi-cell 3D tracking with adaptive acceptance gates

Recent advances in multiphoton microscopy have allowed the capture of dendritic and T cells on video in a 3D volume. This paper reports on an approach for automatically detecting and tracking the cells and collecting statistics on their characteristics of motion and interaction durations. A novel method to extend the track longevity is presented, where an adaptive acceptance gate is computed based on the local target density. Results are provided that show that the total number of track segments was reduced by 22% and the percentage of tracks that lasted longer than half the video increased from 12% to 17% of the total tracks.