Image and data processing algorithms for identifying cell-bound membrane vesicle trajectories and movement information

This DIB article provides details about the trajectory identification and data processing algorithms used in the article “Dynamic single-vesicle tracking of cell-bound membrane vesicles on resting, activated, and cytoskeleton-disrupted cells” (Zhang et al.) [1]. The algorithm identifies vesicles on cell membranes from series of undyed grayscale images captured by the confocal microscope based on contrast differences and then trajectories of vesicles are obtained by analyzing their positions in consecutive images. Once the trajectories have been obtained, other quantitative movement information, such as moving speed, direction and acceleration, are derived by standard dynamic relations.