Autonomous migration is essential for the function of immune cells such as neutrophils and plays a pivotal role in diverse diseases. Recently, we introduced ComplexEye, a multi-lens array microscope comprising 16 independent aberration-corrected glass lenses arranged at the pitch of a 96-well plate, capable of capturing high-resolution movies of migrating cells. This architecture enables high-throughput live-cell video microscopy for migration analysis, supporting routine quantification of autonomous motility with strong potential for clinical translation. However, ComplexEye and similar high-throughput imaging platforms generate data at an exponential rate, imposing substantial burdens on storage and transmission. To address this challenge, we present FlowRoI, a fast optical-flow-based region of interest (RoI) extraction framework designed for high-throughput image compression in immune cell migration studies. FlowRoI estimates optical flow between consecutive frames and derives RoI masks that reliably cover nearly all migrating cells. The raw image and its corresponding RoI mask are then jointly encoded using JPEG2000 to enable RoI-aware compression. FlowRoI operates with high computational efficiency, achieving runtimes comparable to standard JPEG2000 and reaching an average throughput of about 30 frames per second on a modern laptop equipped with an Intel i7-1255U CPU. In terms of image quality, FlowRoI yields higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) in cellular regions and achieves 2.0-2.2x higher compression rates at matched PSNR compared to standard JPEG2000.

翻译：自主迁移对于中性粒细胞等免疫细胞的功能至关重要，并在多种疾病中发挥关键作用。近期，我们开发了ComplexEye，这是一种多透镜阵列显微镜，由16个独立像差校正玻璃透镜组成，以96孔板间距排列，能够捕获迁移细胞的高分辨率动态影像。该架构实现了用于迁移分析的高通量活细胞视频显微技术，支持对自主运动性的常规量化，具有显著的临床转化潜力。然而，ComplexEye及类似的高通量成像平台以指数级速率产生数据，给存储和传输带来沉重负担。为应对这一挑战，我们提出FlowRoI，一种基于快速光流的感兴趣区域提取框架，专为免疫细胞迁移研究中的高通量图像压缩而设计。FlowRoI通过估计连续帧间的光流，生成能可靠覆盖几乎所有迁移细胞的RoI掩膜。原始图像及其对应的RoI掩膜随后通过JPEG2000进行联合编码，实现RoI感知压缩。FlowRoI具有高计算效率，其运行时间与标准JPEG2000相当，在配备Intel i7-1255U CPU的现代笔记本电脑上达到约每秒30帧的平均处理速度。在图像质量方面，FlowRoI在细胞区域获得更高的峰值信噪比，并在相同PSNR条件下，相比标准JPEG2000实现2.0-2.2倍的压缩率提升。