Blinking Molecule Tracking

TL;DR

This paper presents a fast, reliable method for tracking blinking molecules in 2D and 3D by globally optimizing connection likelihoods using a flexible cost function and linear programming.

Contribution

It introduces a novel top-down polyhedral approach for molecule tracking that efficiently handles high densities and blinking behavior, adaptable with customizable cost functions.

Findings

High accuracy in molecule tracking demonstrated

Effective in both 2D and 3D scenarios

Compatible with standard linear programming solvers

Abstract

We discuss a method for tracking individual molecules which globally optimizes the likelihood of the connections between molecule positions fast and with high reliability even for high spot densities and blinking molecules. Our method works with cost functions which can be freely chosen to combine costs for distances between spots in space and time and which can account for the reliability of positioning a molecule. To this end, we describe a top-down polyhedral approach to the problem of tracking many individual molecules. This immediately yields an effective implementation using standard linear programming solvers. Our method can be applied to 2D and 3D tracking.