Tracking individual cells through 3D-plus-time confocal microscopy of developing zebrafish embryos is a core bottleneck in developmental biology research — cell density and imaging noise change constantly as the embryo grows, and most tracking architectures assume a roughly fixed, dense field of objects per frame.
This ongoing project develops a sparse-aware transformer architecture for cell tracking that explicitly accounts for the sparsity and density shifts typical of early embryo development, aiming for more robust lineage tracking across the full developmental sequence.