Multiple mucociliary transit marker tracking in synchrotron X-ray images using the global nearest neighbor method

Abstract

Recent research has enabled in-vivo examination of mucociliary transit in live airways by analysing the movement patterns of micron-sized markers in high resolution synchrotron X-ray images. However, high levels of false positives and false negatives severely impact the performance of many automated tracking algorithms. This paper proposes an improved approach to track valid mucociliary transit markers using a modified gating region and cost matrix. The proposed method offers a more effective way to associate markers with the correct trackers. Improved visualization methods are also introduced to assist the interpretation of the tracking results. The tracking method has achieved a tracking accuracy of 81.7% track purity and 71.3% track effectiveness.