Analysis of cell migration patterns in time lapse microscopy using texture features

Cell migration is essential for investigating cell viability during in vitro development. Therefore, exploring the dynamics of cell migration should yield valuable insights into cellular physiological processes in relation to biomechanical properties of the surrounding environment. However, cell migration is usually evaluated by visual inspection in live cell-imaging, which is partially assisted by general-purpose image processing packages. Due to the limited functions of these packages, detailed information of cellular migration might often be disregarded. This study reports a texture extraction technique based on Law's feature masks to analyze the migration pattern of different types of cells in video-microscopy. Two types of cells, mesenchymal stem cells and lung cancer cells, cultured in chitosan-HA membranes were investigated in this study. Our results show that the aggregated cells that did not merge showed a concentric textural pattern, while merged aggregated cells revealed a directional texture pattern, which corresponded to the direction of cell movement. In addition, the texture energy of each direction was calculated across the microscopic video and the dominant textural energy was found to correspond to the direction of the cytoskeleton movement. As cell migration behavior is strongly affected by the cytoskeletal network, the textural pattern may provide an index of the direction of cytoskeleton rearrangement.