Segment Anything for Cell Tracking

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Zhu, Edgü, Mert, Jin, Er, Stegmaier, Johannes
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chen, Zhu
Edgü, Mert
Jin, Er
Stegmaier, Johannes
author_facet Chen, Zhu
Edgü, Mert
Jin, Er
Stegmaier, Johannes
contents Tracking cells and detecting mitotic events in time-lapse microscopy image sequences is a crucial task in biomedical research. However, it remains highly challenging due to dividing objects, low signal-tonoise ratios, indistinct boundaries, dense clusters, and the visually similar appearance of individual cells. Existing deep learning-based methods rely on manually labeled datasets for training, which is both costly and time-consuming. Moreover, their generalizability to unseen datasets remains limited due to the vast diversity of microscopy data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a zero-shot cell tracking framework by integrating Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), a large foundation model designed for general image and video segmentation, into the tracking pipeline. As a fully-unsupervised approach, our method does not depend on or inherit biases from any specific training dataset, allowing it to generalize across diverse microscopy datasets without finetuning. Our approach achieves competitive accuracy in both 2D and large-scale 3D time-lapse microscopy videos while eliminating the need for dataset-specific adaptation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_09943
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Segment Anything for Cell Tracking
Chen, Zhu
Edgü, Mert
Jin, Er
Stegmaier, Johannes
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Tracking cells and detecting mitotic events in time-lapse microscopy image sequences is a crucial task in biomedical research. However, it remains highly challenging due to dividing objects, low signal-tonoise ratios, indistinct boundaries, dense clusters, and the visually similar appearance of individual cells. Existing deep learning-based methods rely on manually labeled datasets for training, which is both costly and time-consuming. Moreover, their generalizability to unseen datasets remains limited due to the vast diversity of microscopy data. To overcome these limitations, we propose a zero-shot cell tracking framework by integrating Segment Anything 2 (SAM2), a large foundation model designed for general image and video segmentation, into the tracking pipeline. As a fully-unsupervised approach, our method does not depend on or inherit biases from any specific training dataset, allowing it to generalize across diverse microscopy datasets without finetuning. Our approach achieves competitive accuracy in both 2D and large-scale 3D time-lapse microscopy videos while eliminating the need for dataset-specific adaptation.
title Segment Anything for Cell Tracking
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09943