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I use a program by kinetic imaging 

http://www.kineticimaging.com/

It was originally written by Dan Zicha and Graham Dunn at King's college London to track cells.
It will either do it automatically, by thresholding, or you can use the mouse to track cells manually.

The data is exportable to a spreadsheet such as excel, or mathematica notebook for analysis, although the program also does some analysis as well.

I'd recommend it.

Michelle

-----Original Message-----
From: James Pawley [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 26 January 2004 01:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: motion tracking


Search the CONFOCAL archive at http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal

>Search the CONFOCAL archive at 
>http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?S1=confocal
>
>Dear All
>
>It is quite true that there are a number of softwares with which one 
>can perform tracking. My main problem is that for the segmentation of 
>the images these usually use tresholding which may work nicely for 
>fluorescent images but fails often when phase contrast images of cell 
>should be tracked. So my question is whether anyone is aware of a 
>software with which one can automatically track phase contrast (or DIC) 
>images of cells with minimal operator interference. Obviously in this 
>case only in 2D...
>
>Thanks   Gabor
>
>--
>Gabor Csucs, PhD
>Light Microscopy Center
>Institute of Biochemistry
>Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETHZ
>
>tel     +41 1 633 6221
>        +41 1 633 6196                 ETH Hönngerberg
>fax     +41 1 633 1124                 CH-8093 Zürich
>email   [log in to unmask]
>www     http://www.biol.ethz.ch


Dear Gabor,

I am not aware of such software.

My suggestion is that you don't use Phase-Contrast (or DIC for that matter).

If you want a single image that will show you RI 
changes, use dark field.  I know that doing this 
as NA >1 is difficult but I think that you will 
find that an NA 1.0 lens will give you a better 
and more easily interpretable image in dark field 
than a 1.2 NA phase of DIC setup on most living 
specimens.

(doesn't work well on thick specimens with a lot 
of "out-of-focus" scattered light.)

Jim P.

--
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Prof. James B. Pawley,                             Ph.  608-263-3147
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"A scientist is not one who can answer questions but one who can question answers."  Theodore Schick Jr., Skeptical Enquirer, 21-2:39