Tracking is a key method to understand the migration and the interaction of cells. However, challenges arise when analyzing the migration of leukocytes observed by multiphoton intravital video microscopy (MP-IVM).
Indeed, the high plasticity, the frequent contacts and the texture-less appearance of these cells, pose difficulties to computer vision and image processing algorithms. Moreover, imaging artifacts such as brightness variation and drift of the sample further challenge the automatic analysis.
Therefore, the main purpose of the Leukocyte Tracking Database (LTDB) is to provide an extensive dataset of MP-IVM videos where cells have been manually tracked by imaging experts.

For further details please refer to the following paper.
Pizzagalli, D. U. et al. Leukocyte Tracking Database, a collection of immune cell tracks from intravital 2-photon microscopy videos.
Sci. Data 5:180129 doi: 10.1038/sdata.2018.129 (2018). https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata2018129

Developing a new tracking algorithm?
LTDB is a tracking ground truth. It can be used either as training/validation or benchmarking dataset.

Want to compare movements of cells?
LTDB aims at being a reference to compare motion of leukocytes in different conditions.
We are expanding this direction with the dedicated tool IMMUNEMAP.org stay tuned!

LTDB has been developed as spin off projects from an interdisciplinary iPhD project funded by Systemsx.ch in collaboration with the Institute for Research in Biomedicine
and the Institute of Computational Science, Università della Svizzera italiana - Switzerland.