Tracking epithelial cell junctions in C. elegans embryogenesis with active contours guided by SIFT flow.

Quantitative analysis of cell shape in live samples is an important goal in developmental biology. Automated or semi-automated segmentation and tracking of cell nuclei has been successfully implemented in several biological systems. Segmentation and tracking of cell surfaces has been more challenging. Here, we present a new approach to tracking cell junctions in the developing epidermis of C. elegans embryos. Epithelial junctions as visualized with DLG-1::GFP form lines at the subapical circumference of differentiated epidermal cells and delineate changes in epidermal cell shape and position. We develop and compare two approaches for junction segmentation. For the first method (projection approach), 3-D cell boundaries are projected into 2D for segmentation using active contours with a nonintersecting force, and subsequently tracked using scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) flow. The resulting 2-D tracked boundaries are then back-projected into 3-D space. The second method (volumetric approach) uses a 3-D extended version of active contours guided by SIFT flow in 3-D space. In both methods, cell junctions are manually located at the first time point and tracked in a fully automated way for the remainder of the video. Using these methods, we have generated the first quantitative description of ventral epidermal cell movements and shape changes during epidermal enclosure.