On the digital trail of mobile cells

Cell migration is a field of intense current research, where biologists increasingly rely on methods and expertise from physics and engineering. Signal processing approaches can contribute significantly to this research, most notably to help analyze the exploding quantity of imaging data produced with standard and new microscopy techniques. In this article, we first provide a brief background on the importance of understanding cell movements, then review a selection of current efforts on tracking moving cells, with an emphasis on deformable model approaches (some ideas expressed in this article have been previously discussed. We will point out some of the main difficulties posed by cellular imaging, discuss advantages and limitations of different tracking techniques, and suggest a few directions for future advances