Nonrigid Registration of 2-D and 3-D Dynamic Cell Nuclei Images for Improved Classification of Subcellular Particle Motion

Abstract

The observed motion of subcellular particles in fluorescence microscopy image sequences of live cells is generally a superposition of the motion and deformation of the cell and the motion of the particles. Decoupling the two types of movements to enable accurate classification of the particle motion requires the application of registration algorithms. We have developed an intensity-based approach for nonrigid registration of multi-channel microscopy image sequences of cell nuclei. First, based on 3-D synthetic images we demonstrate that cell nucleus deformations change the observed motion types of particles and that our approach allows to recover the original motion. Second, we have successfully applied our approach to register 2-D and 3-D real microscopy image sequences. A quantitative experimental comparison with previous approaches for nonrigid registration of cell microscopy has also been performed.

A Guided Tour of Selected Image Processing and Analysis Methods for Fluorescence and Electron Microscopy

“…However tracking methods are not always adapted for motion analysis, especially when the density and the lack of prominent features prevent the individual extraction of objects of interest undergoing complex motion. Accordingly, estimating motion fields can be then more appropriate to capture complex dynamics observed in biological sequences [247], [248]. The usual approach for optical flow estimates the dense motion field by minimizing a global energy functional composed of two terms: (7) where is the dense motion field, is a data term penalizing deviations from a data conservation assumption over time, is a regularization term enforcing smoothness of the flow field and serves as regularization parameter to balance and contributions.…”

Optical flow modeling and computation: A survey

“…Many conceptual and methodological links can also be found between medical image registration and optical flow [100,211,212,219,224]. In microscopy, dense motion can inform about cell deformation [3,90,139,203], motion of cellular structures [73,89], or help for individual cell tracking [167].…”

Four Dimensional Image Registration for Intravital Microscopy

“…Another rigid registration method for canceling motion artifacts of biological objects based on frequency domain techniques is described in [16]. Yet another non-rigid registration method [17] that cancels motion artifacts of subcellular particles in live cell nuclei in temporal 2D and 3D microscopy images by using the extensions of an optic flow method. However, these techniques [15,16,17] are mainly used to register images that contain single cellular structure.…”

“…Yet another non-rigid registration method [17] that cancels motion artifacts of subcellular particles in live cell nuclei in temporal 2D and 3D microscopy images by using the extensions of an optic flow method. However, these techniques [15,16,17] are mainly used to register images that contain single cellular structure. An thin plate spline non-rigid registration method that registers images containing many live cells is described in [18], but it can only cancel the motion artifacts between successive z stack images.…”