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Presentation for poster 1294A, including poster pdf (2020_TAGC_poster_v2.pdf) and movie of poster walk-through video (Plavskin_TAGC2020_poster_walkthrough.mov)

New technological advances have enabled high-throughput phenotyping at the single-cell level. However, analyzing the large amount of data automatically and accurately is a great challenge. Currently available software achieves cell and colony tracking through the use of either manual curation of images, which is time consuming, or high-resolution images requiring specialized microscopy setups or fluorescence, which limits applicability and results in greatly decreased experimental throughput. Here we introduce a new algorithm, Processing Images Easily (PIE), that automatically tracks colonies of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae in low-magnification brightfield images by combining adaptive object-center detection with gradient-based object-outline detection. We tested the performance of PIE on low-magnification brightfield time-lapse images. PIE recognizes colony outlines very robustly and accurately across a wide range of image brightnesses and focal depths. We show that PIE allows for unbiased and precise measurement of growth rates in a large number (>90,000) of microcolonies in a single time-lapse experiment.