Non-rigid multi-frame registration of cell nuclei in live cell fluorescence microscopy image data

• Intensity-based non-rigid multi-frame registration of cell nuclei.
• Information from multiple frames and previously computed transformations is exploited.
• Experimental evaluation based on synthetic and real live cell fluorescence microscopy image data.
• The approach improves significantly the registration accuracy and is more robust to image noise and intensity scaling compared to pairwise registration.

The analysis of the motion of subcellular particles in live cell microscopy images is essential for understanding biological processes within cells. For accurate quantification of the particle motion, compensation of the motion and deformation of the cell nucleus is required. We introduce a non-rigid multi-frame registration approach for live cell fluorescence microscopy image data. Compared to existing approaches using pairwise registration, our approach exploits information from multiple consecutive images simultaneously to improve the registration accuracy. We present three intensity-based variants of the multi-frame registration approach and we investigate two different temporal weighting schemes. The approach has been successfully applied to synthetic and live cell microscopy image sequences, and an experimental comparison with non-rigid pairwise registration has been carried out.

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