Tracking and Analysis of FUCCI-Labeled Cells Based on Particle Filters and Time-to-Event Analysis

FUCCI (fluorescent ubiquitination-based cell cycle indicator) is a fluorescent probe used to visualize the cell cycle progression of individual cells using fluorescent proteins of different colors. Because the cell cycle is related to biological processes such as proliferation of cancer cells, analysis of imaging data visualized using FUCCI is extremely important. This paper proposes a method for spatiotemporal tracking and analysis of FUCCI-labeled cells from time-lapse videos. To address the color transition of the FUCCI-labeled cell with the cell cycle progression, the proposed method simultaneously estimates the location and the cell cycle phase of the target cell. Furthermore, to analyze the cell phase transition, this paper proposes to apply multistate time-to-event analysis to the information obtained through our tracking method. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of our method with application to FUCCI-labeled HuH7 cells (human hepatocellular carcinoma cell line).