Tracking the motion of the outer tips of microtubules

Microtubules play numerous critical roles in a cell such as providing structural tracks for the anchoring and movement of vesicles and chromosomes. Also, the assembly of microtubules coordinates cell division and migration. Abnormal function of the assembly is involved in cancer. To date the study of the microtubule assembly dynamics has been done by visual inspection or manually. In this work we have developed a method to automatically track microtubule tips so as to enable high throughput quantitative studies. Our approach first estimates the region where a tip is expected to lie. In that region a tip feature is computed for all time and used to form the tip trajectory. Last, we evaluate our method with phantom data as well as real sequences of fluorescently tagged living cells