Abstract—FUCCI (fluorescent ubiquitination-based cell cycle indicator) is a fluorescent probe used to visualize the cell cycle progression of individual cells using fluorescent proteins of different colors. Because the cell cycle is related to biological processes such as proliferation of cancer cells, analysis of imaging data visualized using FUCCI is extremely important. This paper proposes a method for spatiotemporal tracking and analysis of FUCCI-labeled cells from time-lapse videos. To address the color transition of the FUCCI-labeled cell with the cell cycle progression, the proposed method simultaneously estimates the location and the cell cycle phase of the target cell. Furthermore, to analyze the cell phase transition, this paper proposes to apply multistate time-to-event analysis to the information obtained through our tracking method. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of our method with application to FUCCI-labeled HuH7 cells (human hepatocellular carcinoma cell line).

Index Terms—Cell cycle, cell tracking, FUCCI, time-to-event analysis, particle filter.

Kenji Fujimoto, Shigeto Seno, Hironori Shigeta, Hideo Matsuda are with Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka, Japan (email: senoo@ist.osaka-u.ac.jp).
Tomohiro Mashita is with Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka, Japan. He is also with Cybermedia Center, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan.
Masaru Ishii is with Graduate School of Medicine, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka, Japan. He is also with Graduate School of Frontier Bioscience, Osaka University, Suita, Osaka, Japan.

Cite: Kenji Fujimoto, Shigeto Seno, Hironori Shigeta, Tomohiro Mashita, Masaru Ishii, Hideo Matsuda, "Tracking and Analysis of FUCCI-Labeled Cells Based on Particle Filters and Time-to-Event Analysis," International Journal of Bioscience, Biochemistry and Bioinformatics vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 94-109, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).