Dr. Takeo Kanade

Tracking a Large Number of Migrating and Proliferating Cells in Time-Lapse Microscopy Imagery


Kanade

Takeo Kanade
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh PA, 15213

Abstract

We have been developing a computer-vision based system that precisely and individually tracks a large number of living cells in a phase-sensitive (phase-contrast and DIC) microscopy image sequence while they undergo migration (translocation), mitosis (division), and apoptosis (death). The output is complete cell lineage information (mother-daughter relations) of the whole cell population, together with description and statistics of cells’ shape, appearance, and motion. Such a capability of high-throughput spatiotemporal analysis helps biologists and tissue engineers to understand and direct cell growth.

The image-analysis task of tracking living cells must cope with the low signal-to-noise ratio and artifacts of phase-sensitive microscopy images, high and varying densities of cell cultures, topological complexities of cell shapes, and occurrences of cell divisions, touching and overlapping. The talk will present the new techniques, the system, and applications that we have worked on.

Biographical Information

Takeo Kanade is the U. A. and Helen Whitaker University Professor of Computer Science and Robotics and the director of NSF-funded Quality of Life Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Doctoral degree in Electrical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1974. After holding a faculty position there, he joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1980, where he was the Director of the Robotics Institute from 1992 to 2001. He also founded the Digital Human Research Center in Tokyo in 2001, for which he served as the director till 2010.

Dr. Kanade works in multiple areas of robotics: computer vision, multi-media, manipulators, autonomous mobile robots, medical robotics and sensors. He has written more than 350 technical papers and reports in these areas, and holds more than 30 patents. He has been the principal investigator of more than a dozen major vision and robotics projects at Carnegie Mellon.

Dr. Kanade has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Fellow of the IEEE; a Fellow of the ACM, a Founding Fellow of American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The awards he has received include the Franklin Institute Bower Prize, Okawa Award, C&C Award, Joseph Engelberger Award, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Pioneer Award, and IEEE PAMI Azriel Rosenfeld Lifetime Accomplishment Award.