Computerized cell tracking: Current methods, tools and challenges

In developmental biology, knowledge of cell structure and their (morpho) dynamic behavior, leads to a comprehensive understanding of their conducts and the mechanisms in which they participate. This knowledge is a decisive factor in biological research and also in all drug development steps, medicinal or preventive therapies. Experimental cell analysis is hard, expensive, and time-consuming. To overcome these difficulties, in recent years, several computational object tracking methods, software system and packages have been developed in cell sciences that bring together different disciplines and branches of technologies. Object tracking is the process of locating and monitoring specific object and its behavior in sequential images. In this paper, a comprehensive review on object tracking stages and computational methods that are utilized in terms of cell tracking has been organized. Besides, the available software packages and toolkits, challenges, and their solution in time lapse microscopy images in this scope were reviewed. The aim of describing computational cell tracking methods and tools is that biologist and cell scientists might take advantage of these computational techniques to effort another method to gain complementary information for their question of interest.