CELLECT: contrastive embedding learning for large-scale efficient cell tracking

Nature Methods, 2025

Hongyu Zhou#; Seonghoon Kim#...Jiamin Wu*; Qionghai Dai*.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-025-02886-x

Abstract

Quantitative analysis of large-scale cellular behaviors plays an increasingly crucial role in understanding mechanisms of diverse physiopathological processes, but achieving cell tracking with both high performance and efficiency in practical applications remains a challenge. Here we introduce CELLECT, a contrastive embedding learning method for large-scale efficient cell tracking, and demonstrate it on the Caenorhabditis elegans dataset in the Cell Tracking Challenge. By contrastive learning of latent embeddings of diverse cellular structures, a CELLECT model pretrained on a single public dataset can be effectively applied across different imaging modalities and species with broad generalization. Using advanced two-photon imaging, CELLECT enables real-time 3D tracking of large-scale B cells with frequent divisions during germinal center formation in a mouse lymph node, quantitative identification of cell–bacterium interactions in the mouse spleen and high-fidelity extraction of neural signals during strong nonrigid motions. We believe that these results demonstrate broad applications of CELLECT in immunology, pathology and neuroscience.