An objective comparison of cell-tracking algorithms.

Type	Information
Nr	61 (Research article)
Authors	Ulman, Vladimír; Maška, Martin; Magnusson, Klas; Ronneberger, Olaf; Haubold, Carsten; Harder, Nathalie; Matula, Pavel; Matula, Petr; Svoboda, David; Radojevic, Miroslav; Smal, Ihor; Rohr, Karl; Jaldén, Joakim; Blau, Helen; Dzyubachyk, Oleh; Lelieveldt, Boudewijn; Xiao, Pengdong; Li, Yuexiang; Cho, Siu-Yeung; Dufour, Alexandre; Olivo-Marin, Jean-Christophe; Reyes-Aldasoro, Constantino; Solis-Lemus, Jose; Bensch, Robert; Brox, Thomas; Stegmaier, Johannes; Mikut, Ralf; Wolf, Steffen; Hamprecht, Fred; Esteves, Tiago; Quelhas, Pedro; Demirel, Ömer; Malmström, Lars; Jug, Florian; Tomancak, Pavel; Meijering, Erik; Muñoz-Barrutia, Arrate; Kozubek, Michal; Ortiz-de-Solorzano, Carlos
Title	An objective comparison of cell-tracking algorithms.
Journal	Nat Methods (2017) 14(12) 1141-1152
DOI	10.1038/nmeth.4473
Citations	552 citations (journal impact: 25.06)
Abstract	We present a combined report on the results of three editions of the Cell Tracking Challenge an ongoing initiative aimed at promoting the development and objective evaluation of cell segmentation and tracking algorithms. With 21 participating algorithms and a data repository consisting of 13 data sets from various microscopy modalities the challenge displays todays state-of-the-art methodology in the field. We analyzed the challenge results using performance measures for segmentation and tracking that rank all participating methods. We also analyzed the performance of all of the algorithms in terms of biological measures and practical usability. Although some methods scored high in all technical aspects none obtained fully correct solutions. We found that methods that either take prior information into account using learning strategies or analyze cells in a global spatiotemporal video context performed better than other methods under the segmentation and tracking scenarios included in the challenge.