Study of immune cells’ migration patterns in cancer

Abstract

Immune cells’ migration is a very important mechanism to respond to external infections or pathological process such as cancer. Although it is proved that cell migration in 3D spaces follow an anisotropic persistent random walk pattern (APRW), we prove in this work that this is not true for immune cells migrating in colorectal cancer (APC−/−) conditioned media. We develop a segmentation model for 3D images in order to track the cells. With the trackings, we demonstrate that in this media immune cells migrate at higher velocity and with straighter paths, contrary to what is described by APRW model.