  Accurate tracking of cellular and subcellular structures, along with their
dynamics, plays a pivotal role in understanding the underlying mechanisms of
biological systems. This paper presents a novel approach, ProGroTrack, that
combines the You Only Look Once (YOLO) and ByteTrack algorithms within the
detection-based tracking (DBT) framework to track intracellular protein
nanostructures. Focusing on iPAK4 protein fibers as a representative case
study, we conducted a comprehensive evaluation of YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 models,
revealing the superior performance of YOLOv5 on our dataset. Notably, YOLOv5x
achieved an impressive mAP50 of 0.839 and F-score of 0.819. To further optimize
detection capabilities, we incorporated semi-supervised learning for model
improvement, resulting in enhanced performances in all metrics. Subsequently,
we successfully applied our approach to track the growth behavior of iPAK4
protein fibers, revealing their two distinct growth phases consistent with a
previously reported kinetic model. This research showcases the promising
potential of our approach, extending beyond iPAK4 fibers. It also offers a
significant advancement in precise tracking of dynamic processes in live cells,
and fostering new avenues for biomedical research.
