Segmentation and Track-Analysis in Time-Lapse Imaging of Bacteria

In this paper, we have developed tools to analyze prokaryotic cells growing in monolayers in a microfluidic device. Individual bacterial cells are identified using a novel curvature based approach and tracked over time for several generations. The resulting tracks are thereafter assessed and filtered based on track quality for subsequent analysis of bacterial growth rates. The proposed method performs comparable to the state-of-the-art methods for segmenting phase contrast and fluorescent images, and we show a 10-fold increase in analysis speed.