Cell Tracking according to Biological Needs -- Strong Mitosis-aware Multi-Hypothesis Tracker with Aleatoric Uncertainty
This work addresses the lack of long-term consistency and lineage accuracy in cell tracking for biologists, representing a strong specific gain in a domain-specific area.
The paper tackles the problem of cell tracking in microscopy data by introducing an uncertainty estimation technique and a mitosis-aware multi-hypothesis tracker, achieving improvements by a factor of approximately 6 on biologically inspired metrics across nine datasets.
Cell tracking and segmentation assist biologists in extracting insights from large-scale microscopy time-lapse data. Driven by local accuracy metrics, current tracking approaches often suffer from a lack of long-term consistency and the ability to reconstruct lineage trees correctly. To address this issue, we introduce an uncertainty estimation technique for motion estimation frameworks and extend the multi-hypothesis tracking framework. Our uncertainty estimation lifts motion representations into probabilistic spatial densities using problem-specific test-time augmentations. Moreover, we introduce a novel mitosis-aware assignment problem formulation that allows multi-hypothesis trackers to model cell splits and to resolve false associations and mitosis detections based on long-term conflicts. In our framework, explicit biological knowledge is modeled in assignment costs. We evaluate our approach on nine competitive datasets and demonstrate that we outperform the current state-of-the-art on biologically inspired metrics substantially, achieving improvements by a factor of approximately 6 and uncover new insights into the behavior of motion estimation uncertainty.