Tracking molecular particles in live cells using fuzzy rule-based system.

Recent development of detection techniques of molecular particles in live cells has stimulated interest in developing the new powerful techniques to track the molecular particles in live cells. One special type of cellular microscopy images is about the formation and transportation of clathrin-coated pits and vesicles. Clathrin-coated pits are very important in studying the behavior of proteins and lipids in live cells. To answer the question, whether there exist "hot spots" for the formation of Clathrin-coated pits or the pits and arrays formed randomly on the plasma membrane, it is necessary to track many hundreds of individual pits dynamically in live-cell microscope movies to capture and monitor how pits and vesicles were formed. Therefore, a motion correspondence algorithm based on fuzzy rule-based system is proposed to resolve the problem of ambiguous association encountered in these dynamic, live-cell images of clathrin assemblies. Results show that this method can accurately track most of the particles in the high volume images. Copyright 2007 International Society for Analytical Cytology.