Scientists from the research center Applied Medicine (CIMA) of the University of Navarra have presented the results of the first challenge, or international competition between groups of research, on cell detection and tracking in two- and three-dimensional microscopy videos. The work, published in the latest issue of the journal Bioinformatics, in addition to presenting the results of the competition, makes available to the international community objective methods of assessment for new means of cell detection and tracking, as well as a archive populated with annotated videos from a wide variety of sources. The article details the preliminary results of the challenge, which were presented at the 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Engineering, in San Francisco, California.

The automatic tracking of cells in fluorescence microscopy sequences is very useful in different biomedical applications, such as the study of metastasis or wound closure, among others. Until now, each group of research worked with its own analysis methods and sets of data, without contrasting with other equipment, which detracts from the objectivity of the results. The work developed at CIMA proposes a homogeneous framework to evaluate cell tracking algorithms.

"The main contribution of our work is the creation of a complete archive of data annotated video obtained from groups in Europe and the United States. With the information obtained we have defined objective measures to classify six algorithms from six groups that participated in the challenge, according to their performance in synthetic and real cells," explains Dr. Carlos Ortiz de Solórzano, director of the Imaging Platform of CIMA and of the challenge, co-organized with groups from the Czech Republic and the Netherlands and in which other centers from Spain, Germany, Sweden and the United States participated.

The second edition of the challenge is currently underway, with new data proposing more complex problems to analyze. Preliminary results were recently presented at the 2014 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, held in Beijing (China).

For more information, you can visit the website of the challenge