Minimum Information About Particle Tracking Experiments

We are proposing a minimum information reporting guideline we term Minimum Information About Particle Tracking Experiments (MIAPTE) that we hope will facilitate the sharing and dissemination of results obtained from Multiple Particle Tracking (MPT) experiments. For our purposes, MPT is defined as described by Chenouard et al. 2014.  For a brief explanation of the problem you can refer to this nice tutorial page available from Thierry Savin.  MIAPTE conforms to the criteria posited by Taylor et al. 2008 and currently maintained by the Minimum Information for Biological and Biomedical Investigations (MIBBI) foundry. MIAPTE can also be considered as an extension of the OME-XML data model in that elements, attributes and types defined in that model are re-used here when appropriate to avoid “reinventing the wheel”.

The MIAPTE model is intended with different categories of users in mind:

1. Scientists that have produced or are in the course of producing new results and are hoping to make such results available (via deposition to public repositories or via publication) in a way that can be interpreted unequivocally by both humans and machines. This would for example allow results to be re analyzed and merged with other compatible data to produce more complete datasets. For this class of users MIAPTE simply provides a of controlled vocabulary terms to define data entries and the analysis workflow in an unified manner.
2. Scientists that want to evaluate, replicate and re-analyze results published by others. For this class of users MIAPTE provides descriptors that define the analysis procedures manner that facilitates its reproduction. It also provides data structures that allows to easily retrieve all pieces of information required to access the data in a machine-readable manner.
3. Developers who want to take advantage of MIAPTE and the XML schema files (Section 1 and Section 2) that comes with it to produce tools that are capable to inter-operate with the tools produced by the OMEGA project.

The current version of the model, MIAPTE v02, was recently published on bioRXiv.org .  MIAPTE should be intended as a Request for Comments type of publication. Any member of the scientific or developer community is invited to collaborate with us to help us to modify, extend, improve the model.

MIAPTE is structured in two sub-sections:

MIAPTE – Section 1 contains metadata field names and data structures describing particles, links, trajectories and trajectory segments.	MIAPTE – Section 2 contains metadata field names utilized to report details about the algorithmic procedures utilized to produce and analyze trajectories as well as the results of trajectory analysis.