Analyzing temporal dynamics of cell deformation and intracellular movement with video feature aggregation

BACKGROUND: The research and analysis of cellular physiological properties has been an essential approach to studying some biological and biomedical problems. Temporal dynamics of cells therein are used as a quantifiable indicator of cellular response to extracellular cues and physiological stimuli. METHODS: This work presents a novel image-based framework to profile and model the cell dynamics in live-cell videos. In the framework, the cell dynamics between frames are represented as frame-level features from cell deformation and intracellular movement. On the one hand, shape context is introduced to enhance the robustness of measuring the deformation of cellular contours. On the other hand, we employ Scale-Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) flow to simultaneously construct the complementary movement field and appearance change field for the cytoplasmic streaming. Then, time series modeling is performed on these frame-level features. Specifically, temporal feature aggregation is applied to capture the video-wide temporal evolution of cell dynamics. RESULTS: Our results demonstrate that the proposed cell dynamic features can effectively capture the cell dynamics in videos. They also prove that the Movement Field and Appearance Change Field Feature (MFAFF) can more precisely model the cytoplasmic streaming. Besides, temporal aggregation of cell dynamic features brings a substantial absolute increase of classification performance. CONCLUSION: Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms competing mainstreaming approaches on the aforementioned datasets. Thus, our method has potential for cell dynamics analysis in videos. [Image: see text] ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12938-019-0638-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.