Cell Tracking Challenge 2024

The Cell Tracking Challenge (CTC) was launched in 2012, with the aim of fostering the development of novel, robust cell segmentation and tracking algorithms, and helping the developers with the evaluation of their new algorithmic developments. Over its more than a decade long existence, six fixed-deadline ISBI challenge editions have been organized, and since February 2017, the challenge is open for online submissions that are monthly evaluated, ranked, and posted on the challenge website. So far, two benchmarks have been offered, namely segmentation-and-tracking benchmark (evaluating segmentation and tracking performance) and segmentation-only benchmark (evaluating purely segmentation performance, no tracking part is required). A detailed description of the focus and history of the CTC can be found at http://celltrackingchallenge.net/ and in the new open-access Nature Methods summary of the 10 years of its existence. The CTC is in constant evolution, and - as we did in the previous six editions attached to ISBI 2013-2015 and ISBI 2019-2021 - we plan to introduce some novelties in this new ISBI-sponsored challenge event.

Specifically, in this new 7th edition, the participants will be encouraged to submit further solutions to the recently opened generalizability tasks - either in the frame of the
segmentation-and-tracking benchmark (Task 1) or the segmentation-only benchmark (Task 2). The generalizability tasks focus on the development of methods that exhibit better generalizability and work across most, if not all, of the existing datasets, instead of being optimized for one or a few datasets only. These tasks were established for the ISBI 2021 edition, and their first results were reported in the abovementioned paper, but no further results have been received since then.

Furthermore, a new tracking-only - more precisely linking-only benchmark (Cell Linking Benchmark) will be introduced to complement the segmentation-only benchmark for those who want to evaluate purely the object linking methods without having to supply segmentation results. Such a benchmark has been missing in the CTC portfolio and it is demanded by the CTC participants and the scientific community at large. Participants will be encouraged to supply ideally generalizable solutions (Task 3) working across 13 preselected datasets but will also be able to submit dataset-specific solutions (Task 4) for datasets of their choice.