CellTracksColab—A platform for compiling, analyzing, and exploring tracking data

Abstract

In life sciences, tracking objects from movies enables researchers to quantify the behavior of single particles, organelles, bacteria, cells, and even whole animals. While numerous tools now allow automated tracking from video, a significant challenge persists in compiling, analyzing, and exploring the large datasets generated by these approaches. Here, we introduce CellTracksColab, an online platform tailored to simplify the exploration and analysis of tracking data by leveraging the free, cloud-based computational resources of Google Colab. CellTracksColab facilitates the amalgamation and analysis of results across multiple fields of view, conditions, and repeats, ensuring a holistic dataset overview. CellTracksColab also harnesses the power of high-dimensional data reduction and clustering, enabling researchers to identify distinct behavioral patterns and trends without bias. Finally, CellTracksColab also includes specialized analysis modules enabling spatial analyses (clustering, proximity to specific regions of interest). CellTracksColab is available for the broader scientific community here.