Machine learning tracks moving cells

Both developing babies and elderly adults share a common characteristic: the many cells making up their bodies are always on the move. As we humans commute to work, cells migrate through the body to get their jobs done. Biologists have long struggled to quantify the movement and changing morphology of cells through time, but now, scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST) have devised an elegant tool to do just that. Using machine learning, the researchers designed a software to analyze microscopic snapshots of migrating cells. They named the software Usiigaci, a Ryukyuan word that refers to tracing the outlines of objects, as the innovative tool detects the changing outlines of individual cells.