Oxford Instruments Imaris for Tracking image analysis software

Imaris for Tracking, from Oxford Instruments, provides interactive processing, visualisation and analysis software for 3D and 4D microscopic images. Applications include cell tracking, organelle tracking, lineage tracing, studying cell division, cancer cell invasion and much more.

Featuring state-of-the-art volume rendering, plus object detection and tracking tools, the software is suitable for researchers who want to automatically analyse moving objects including those that divide over time, create a lineage tree plot and generate quantitative information from their image data. It includes technology to address the major bottleneck of today’s image analysis — effective quantification and surface visualisation of objects within datasets of hundreds of gigabytes.

The software gives the choice of proven Imaris 3D tracking algorithms — Brownian Motion, Auto-regressive Motion (Expert), Connected Components or Lineage — to generate the most accurate tracking results for different types of moving objects. Users can automatically correct translational and rotational drift or track within the freehand coordinate system (Reference Frame) or use the automated option for drift correction.

Motion features include: automatically tracking objects of interest using one of the provided algorithms; handling thousands of objects and time points; representing trajectory or displacement using multiple visualisation options; calculating average and instantaneous speed/acceleration; and manually creating and editing tracks

After segmenting the image data, the software calculates a wide range of statistics through time for all detected objects, Surfaces and Spots. All values can be used for colour coding, plotted inside Imaris (using Vantage plots) or exported in a .csv or .xls file format.

The software enables easy manual editing of the results of automated tracking. Labels can be used to add additional descriptive parameters.