C++

VTK is an open-source software system for image processing, 3D graphics, volume rendering and visualization. VTK includes many advanced algorithms (e.g., surface reconstruction, implicit modeling, decimation) and rendering techniques (e.g., hardware-accelerated volume rendering, LOD control).

VTK is used by academicians for teaching and research; by government research institutions such as Los Alamos National Lab in the US or CINECA in Italy; and by many commercial firms who use VTK to build or extend products.

The origin of VTK is with the textbook "The Visualization Toolkit, an Object-Oriented Approach to 3D Graphics" originally published by Prentice Hall and now published by Kitware, Inc. (Third Edition ISBN 1-930934-07-6). VTK has grown (since its initial release in 1994) to a world-wide user base in the commercial, academic, and research communities.

SMLM is a mature but still growing field, which still lacks efficient and user-friendly analysis and visualization software platform adapted for both users and developers. We here introduce PoCA, a powerful open-source software platform dedicated to the visualization and analysis of 2D and 3D point-cloud data. PoCA allows manipulating large datasets, and integrates a plugin architecture, a native batch analysis engine and a Python code interpreter, facilitating both the analysis of data and the integration of new methods.

Orthanc aims at providing a simple, yet powerful standalone DICOM server. It is designed to improve the DICOM flows in hospitals and to support research about the automated analysis of medical images. Orthanc lets its users focus on the content of the DICOM files, hiding the complexity of the DICOM format and of the DICOM protocol.

Orthanc can turn any computer running Windows, Linux or OS X into a DICOM store (in other words, a mini-PACS system). Its architecture is lightweight and standalone, meaning that no complex database administration is required, nor the installation of third-party dependencies.

What makes Orthanc unique is the fact that it provides a RESTful API. Thanks to this major feature, it is possible to drive Orthanc from any computer language. The DICOM tags of the stored medical images can be downloaded in the JSON file format. Furthermore, standard PNG images can be generated on-the-fly from the DICOM instances by Orthanc.

Orthanc also features a plugin mechanism to add new modules that extends the core capabilities of its REST API. A Web viewer, a PostgreSQL database back-end, a MySQL database back-end, and a reference implementation of DICOMweb are currently freely available as plugins.

ClearMap is a toolbox for the analysis and registration of volumetric data from cleared tissues.

It was initially developed to map brain activity at cellular resolution in whole mouse brains using immediate early gene expression. It has since then been extended as a tool for the qunatification of whole mouse brain vascualtur networks at capilary resolution.

It is composed of sevral specialized modules or scripts: tubemap, cellmap, WobblyStitcher.

ClearMap has been designed to analyze O(TB) 3d datasets obtained via light sheet microscopy from iDISCO+ cleared tissue samples immunolabeled for proteins. The ClearMap tools may also be useful for data obtained with other types of microscopes, types of markers, clearing techniques, as well as other species, organs, or samples.

ND-SAFIR is a software for denoising n-dimentionnal images especially dedicated to microscopy image sequence analysis. It is able to deal with 2D, 3D, 2D+time, 3D+time images have one or more color channel. It is adapted to Gaussian and Poisson-Gaussian noise which are usually encountered in photonic imaging. Several papers describe the detail of the method used in ndsafir to recover noise free images (see references).

It is available either in Metamorph (commercial version), either as command line tool. Source are available on demand.

Vaa3d BJUT Fast Marching Spanning Tree algorithm dockerised workflow for BIAFLOWS

3D Neuron Tracing with a Dockerized version of Vaa3D MOST Raytracer.

3D Neuron Tracing using Dockerized version of Vaa3D Minimum Spanning Tree (MST).

Vaa3d All-Path-Pruning 2.0 (APP2) dockerised workflow for BIAFLOWS.

QuickFit 3 is a data evaluation software for FCS Fluorescence Correlation Spectroscopy and imagingFCS (imFCS) measurements, developed in the group B040 (Prof. Jörg Langowski) at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ). Actually QuickFit 3 itself is a project manager and all functionality is added as plugins. A set of tested plugins for FCS, imagingFCS and some microscopy-related image processing tasks is supplied together with the software.

Wolfram Mathematica (usually termed Mathematica) is a modern technical computing system spanning most areas of technical computing — including neural networks, machine learning, image processing, geometry, data science, visualizations, and others. The system is used in many technical, scientific, engineering, mathematical, and computing fields.

This is a (Cython-based) Python wrapper for Philipp Krähenbühl's Fully-Connected CRFs (version 2).

PyTorch is an open-source machine learning library for Python, based on Torch, used for applications such as natural language processing.

VascuSynth is an ITK-based synthetic image generator. It synthesizes volumetric images of vascular trees and generates a .gxl file of the ground-truth tree structure. VascuSynth receives a number of .txt configuration files and is capable of generating both ground truth ('ideal') images and images with added noise. The user is capable of choosing from a set simple noise additions and artefacts.

TEM ExosomeAnalyzer is a program for automatic and semi-automatic detection of extracellular vesicles (EVs), such as exosomes, or similar objects in 2D images from transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The program detects the EVs, finds their boundaries, and reports information about their size and shape.

The software has been developed in terms of project MUNI/M/1050/2013 and supported by Grant Agency of Masaryk University.

The EVs are detected based on the shape and edge contrast criteria. The exact shapes of the EVs are then segmented using a watershed-based approach.

With proper parameter settings, even images with EVs both lighter and darked than the background, or containing artifacts or precipitated stain can be processed. If the fully-automatic processing fails to produce the correct results, the program can be used semi-automatically, letting the user adjust the detection seeds during the intermediate steps, or even draw the whole segmentation manually.

It is an interactive front-end visualization for registration software based on Elasix (VTK/ITK)

3Dscript is a plugin for Fiji/ImageJ for creating 3D and 4D animations of microscope data. In contrast to existing 3D visualization packages, animations are not keyframe-based, but are described by a natural language-based syntax.

ParaView is an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application. ParaView users can quickly build visualizations to analyze their data using qualitative and quantitative techniques. The data exploration can be done interactively in 3D or programmatically using ParaView’s batch processing capabilities.

ParaView was developed to analyze extremely large datasets using distributed memory computing resources. It can be run on supercomputers to analyze datasets of petascale size as well as on laptops for smaller data, has become an integral tool in many national laboratories, universities and industry, and has won several awards related to high performance computation.

ZEN and APEER – Open Ecosystem for integrated Machine-Learning Workflows

Open ecosystem for integrated machine-learning workflows to train and use machine-learning models for image processing and image analysis inside the ZEN software or on the APEER cloud-based platform

Highlights ZEN

• Simple User Interface for Labeling and Training
• Engineered Features Sets and Deep Feature Extraction + Random Forrest for Semantic Segmentation
• Object Classification workflows
• Probability Thresholds and Conditional Random Fields
• Import your own trained models as *.czann files (see: czmodel · PyPI)
• Import "AIModel Containes" from arivis AI for advanced Instance Segmentation
• Integration into ZEN Measurement Framework
• Support for Multi-dimensional Datasets and Tile Images
• open and standardized format to store trained models

ZEN Intellesis Segmentation

ZEN Intellesis - Pretrained Networks

Intellesis Object Classification

Highlights Aarivis AI

• Web-based tool to label datasets to train Deep Neural Networks
• Fully automated hyper-parameter tuning
• Export of trained models for semantic segmentation and AIModelContainer for Instance Segmentation

Annotation Tool

CompuCell3D is a flexible scriptable modeling environment, which allows the rapid construction of sharable Virtual Tissue in-silico simulations of a wide variety of multi-scale, multi-cellular problems including angiogenesis, bacterial colonies, cancer, developmental biology, evolution, the immune system, tissue engineering, toxicology and even non-cellular soft materials. CompuCell3D models have been used to solve basic biological problems, to develop medical therapies, to assess modes of action of toxicants and to design engineered tissues. CompuCell3D intuitive and make Virtual Tissue modeling accessible to users without extensive software development or programming experience.

It uses Cellular Potts Model to model cell behavior.

Elastix is a toolbox for rigid and nonrigid registration of (medical) images.

Elastix is based on the ITK library, and provides additional algorithms for image registration. 

The software can be run as a single-line command, making it easy to include in larger scripts or workflows. The user needs to edit a configuration file that contains all relevant parameters for registration: transformation model, metric used to comapre images, optimization algorithm, mutliscale pyramidal representation of images...

Nowadays elastix is accompanied by SimpleElastix, making it available in other languages like C++, Python, Java, R, Ruby, C# and Lua.

CaPTk is a software platform for analysis of radiographic cancer images, currently focusing on brain, breast, and lung cancer. CaPTk integrates advanced, validated tools performing various aspects of medical image analysis, that have been developed in the context of active clinical research studies and collaborations toward addressing real clinical needs. With emphasis given in its use as a very lightweight and efficient viewer, and with no prerequisites for substantial computational background, CaPTk aims to facilitate the swift translation of advanced computational algorithms into routine clinical quantification, analysis, decision making, and reporting workflow. Its long-term goal is providing widely used technology that leverages the value of advanced imaging analytics in cancer prediction, diagnosis and prognosis, as well as in better understanding the biological mechanisms of cancer development.

Multicut workflow for large connectomics data. Using luigi for pipelining and caching processing steps. Most of the computations are done out-of-core using hdf5 as backend and implementations from nifty

ANTs computes high-dimensional mappings to capture the statistics of brain structure and function.

Image Registration

Diffeomorphisms: SyN, Independent Evaluation: Klein, Murphy, Template Construction (2004)(2010), Similarity Metrics, Multivariate registration, Multiple modality analysis and statistical bias

Image Segmentation

Atropos Multivar-EM Segmentation (link), Multi-atlas methods (link) and JLF, Bias Correction (link), DiReCT cortical thickness (link), DiReCT in chimpanzees

A software toolkit for computational morphometry of biomedical images, CMTK comprises a set of command line tools and a back-end general-purpose library for processing and I/O.

The command line tools primarily provide the following functionality: registration (affine and nonrigid; single and multi-channel; pairwise and groupwise), image correction (MR bias field estimation; interleaved image artifact correction; EPI unwarping), processing (filters; combination of segmentations via voting and STAPLE; shape-based averaging), statistics (t-tests; general linear model).

TeraStitcher is a free tool that enables the stitching of Teravoxel-sized tiled microscopy images even on workstations with relatively limited resources of memory (<8 GB) and processing power. It exploits the knowledge of approximate tile positions and uses ad-hoc strategies and algorithms designed for such very large datasets. The produced images can be saved into a multiresolution representation to be efficiently visualized (e.g. Vaa3D-TeraFly) and processed.

OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and other processors or hardware accelerators. OpenCL specifies programming languages (based on C99 and C++11) for programming these devices and application programming interfaces (APIs) to control the platform and execute programs on the compute devices. OpenCL provides a standard interface for parallel computing using task- and data-based parallelism.

OpenCL is an open standard maintained by the non-profit technology consortium Khronos Group. Conformant implementations are available from Altera, AMD, Apple, ARM, Creative, IBM, Imagination, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung, Vivante, Xilinx, and ZiiLABS.[7][8]

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

NeuroGPS-Tree is a workflow developed to reconstruct a neuronal population from a dense, large-scale data set. NeuroGPS-Tree is suitable for processing image stacks acquired by different image modalities.

This project was designed for vectorize and analyze the  blood vessels in the mouse brain.

This plugin requires the definition of seed point detection settings by the user (Semi-automated).

We have developed a novel approach, named DF-Tracing, to tackle this challenge. This method first extracts the neurite signal (foreground) from a noisy image by using anisotropic filtering and automated thresholding. Then, DF-Tracing executes a coupled distance-field (DF) algorithm on the extracted foreground neurite signal and reconstructs the neuron morphology automatically. Two distance-transform based “force” fields are used: one for “pressure”, which is the distance transform field of foreground pixels (voxels) to the background, and another for “thrust”, which is the distance transform field of the foreground pixels to an automatically determined seed point. The coupling of these two force fields can“push” a “rolling ball” quickly along the skeleton of a neuron, reconstructing the 3D cell morphology.

The module provides biological visual systems models (human visual system and others). It also provides derivated objects that take advantage of those bio-inspired models.

nctuTW is a "high-throughput computer method of reconstructing the neuronal structure of the fruit fly brain. The design philosophy of the proposed method differs from those of previous methods. We propose first to compute the 2D skeletons of a neuron in each slice of the image stack. The 3D neuronal structure is then constructed from the 2D skeletons. Biologists tend to use confocal microscopes for optimal images in a slice for human visualization; and images in two consecutive slices contain overlapped information. Consequently, a spherical object becomes oval in the image stack; that is, neurons in the image stack do not reflect the true shape of the neuron. This is the main reason we chose not to work directly on the 3D volume.

The proposed method comprises two steps. The first is the image processing step, which involves computing a set of voxels that is a superset of the 3D centerlines of the neuron. The shortest path graph algorithm then computes the centerlines. The proposed method was applied to process more than 16 000 neurons. By using a large amount of reconstructions, this study also demonstrated a result derived from the reconstructed data using the clustering technique." (Extracted from reference publication)

Illustrative image shows gold standard (top) and method results (bottom). 

ORION: Online Reconstruction and functional Imaging Of Neurons: segmentation and tracing of neurons for reconstruction.

A project to develop tools that explore single neuron function via sophisticated image analysis. ORION software bridges advanced optical imaging and compartmental modeling of neuronal function by rapidly, accurately, and robustly generating, from structural image data, a cylindrical morphology model suitable for simulating neuronal function. The goal of this project is to develop a computational and experimental framework to allow real-time mapping of functional imaging data (e.g., spatio-temporal patterns of dendritic voltages or intracellularions) to neuronal structure, during the very limited duration of an acute experiment.

WND-CHARM is a multi-purpose image classifier that can be applied to a wide variety of image classification tasks without modifications or fine-tuning, and yet provides classification accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art task-specific image classifiers. WND-CHARM can extract up to ~3,000 generic image descriptors (features) including polynomial decompositions, high contrast features, pixel statistics, and textures. These features are derived from the raw image, transforms of the image, and compound transforms of the image (transforms of transforms). The features are filtered and weighted depending on their effectiveness in discriminating between a set of predefined image classes (the training set). These features are then used to classify test images based on their similarity to the training classes. This classifier was tested on a wide variety of imaging problems including biological and medical image classification using several imaging modalities, face recognition, and other pattern recognition tasks. WND-CHARM is an acronym that stands for "Weighted Neighbor Distance using Compound Hierarchy of Algorithms Representing Morphology."

"we present a new fully automated 3D reconstruction algorithm, called TReMAP, short for Tracing, Reverse Mapping and Assembling of 2D Projections. Instead of tracing a 3D image directly in the 3D space as seen in majority of the tracing methods, we first trace the 2D projection trees in 2Dplanes, followed by reverse-mapping the resulting 2D tracing results back into the 3D space as 3D curves; then we use a minimal spanning tree (MST) method to assemble all the 3D curves to generate the final 3D reconstruction. Because we simplify a 3D reconstruction problem into 2D, the computational costs are reduced dramatically." 

Suitable for high throughput neuron image analysis (image sizes >10GB). This plugin can be used with default parameters or user-defined parameters.

All-path-pruning 2.0 (APP2) is a component of Vaa3D. APP2 prunes an initial reconstruction tree of a neuron’s morphology using a long-segment-first hierarchical procedure instead of the original termini-first-search process in APP. APP2 computes the distance transform of all image voxels directly for a gray-scale image, without the need to binarize the image before invoking the conventional distance transform. APP2 uses a fast-marching algorithm-based method to compute the initial reconstruction trees without pre-computing a large graph. This method allows to trace large images. This method can be used with default parameters or user-defined parameters.

Vaa3D is a handy, fast, and versatile 3D/4D/5D Image Visualization and Analysis System for Bioimages and Surface Objects. It also provides many unique functions that you may not find in other software. It is Open Source, and supports a very simple and powerful plugin interface and thus can be extended and enhanced easily.

Vaa3D is cross-platform (Mac, Linux, and Windows). This software suite is powerful for visualizing large- or massive-scale (giga-voxels and even tera-voxels) 3D image stacks and various surface data. Vaa3D is also a container of powerful modules for 3D image analysis (cell segmentation, neuron tracing, brain registration, annotation, quantitative measurement and statistics, etc) and data management. This makes Vaa3D suitable for various bioimage informatics applications, and a nice platform to develop new 3D image analysis algorithms for high-throughput processing. In short, Vaa3D streamlines the workflow of visualization-assisted analysis.

Vaa3D can render 5D (spatial-temporal) data directly in 3D volume-rendering mode; it supports convenient and interactive local and global 3D views at different scales... it comes with a number of plugins and toolboxes. Importantly, you can now write your own plugins to take advantage of the Vaa3D platform, possibly within minutes!

"We have developed an automatic graph algorithm, called the all-path pruning (APP), to trace the 3D structure of a neuron. To avoid potential mis-tracing of some parts of a neuron, an APP first produces an initial over-reconstruction, by tracing the optimal geodesic shortest path from the seed location to every possible destination voxel/pixel location in the image. Since the initial reconstruction contains all the possible paths and thus could contain redundant structural components (SC), we simplify the entire reconstruction without compromising its connectedness by pruning the redundant structural elements, using a new maximal- covering minimal-redundant (MCMR) subgraph algorithm. We show that MCMR has a linear computational complexity and will converge. We examined the performance of our method using challenging 3D neuronal image datasets of model organisms (e.g. fruit fly)"

This plugin can be used with default parameters or user-defined parameters.

SOAX is an open source software tool to extract the centerlines, junctions and filament lengths of biopolymer networks in 2D and 3D images. It facilitates quantitative, reproducible and objective analysis of the image data. The underlying method of SOAX uses multiple Stretching Open Active Contours (SOACs) that are automatically initialized at image intensity ridges and then stretch along the centerlines of filaments in the network. SOACs can merge, stop at junctions, and reconfigure with others to allow smooth crossing at junctions of filaments.

SOAX provides 3D visualization for exploring image data and visually checking results against the image. Quantitative analysis functions based on extracted networks are also implemented in SOAX, including spatial distribution, orientation, and curvature of filamentous structures. SOAX also provides interactive manual editing to further improve the extraction results, which can be saved in a file for archiving or further analysis. Useful for microtubules or actin filaments.

Observation: Depending on the operating system, the installation may or may not require Boost C++, ITK and VTK libraries. Windows has a standalone executable application without the need of those. 

BioImageXD is a free open source software package for analyzing, processing and visualizing multi-dimensional microscopy images. It's a collaborative project, designed and developed by microscopists, cell biologists and software engineers from the Universities of Jyväskylä and Turku in Finland, Max Planck Institute CBG in Dresden, Germany and collaborators worldwide. BioImageXD was published in the July 2012 issue of Nature Methods.

A standalone cell tracking software for single cell migration. Tracking of cells in tissue was also done in Drosophila germband.

ASAP is an open source platform for visualizing, annotating and automatically analyzing whole-slide histopathology images. It consists of several key-components (slide input/output, image processing, viewer) which can be used seperately. It is built on top of several well-developed open source packages like OpenSlide, Qt and OpenCV but also tries to extend them in several meaningful ways.

Neurolucida is a powerful tool for creating and analyzing realistic, meaningful, and quantifiable neuron reconstructions from microscope images. Perform detailed morphometric analysis of neurons, such as quantifying 1) the number of dendrites, axons, nodes, synapses, and spines, 2) the length, width, and volume of dendrites and axons, 3) the area and volume of the soma, and 4) the complexity and extension of neurons. See 10.3389/fnins.2012.00049

XuvTools (pronounced “ex-you-vee-tools”) is a fully automated 3D stitching software for biomedical image data, typically confocal microscopy images. XuvTools runs on Microsoft Windows XP and Vista, Linux and Apple Mac computers. It supports 32 and 64bit operating systems (with 64bit highly preferred). XuvTools is free and open source software (see Licensing), so you can start using it immediately. Go to Downloads and give it a try. The goal of XuvTools is to provide tools, that combine multiple microscopic recordings to obtain a larger field of view (“stitching”) and a higher dynamic range (“HDR” recombination), or better resolution (multi view reconstruction), and to make these tools publicly available.

Auto-Bayes is a software package based on Bayesian statistics and requires no user dependent parameters for molecule detection and image reconstruction for Single-Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM), including photoactivated localization microscope (PALM), stochastic optical reconstruction microscope (STORM), and direct stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (dSTORM), etc.

Free-D (http://free-d.versailles.inra.fr/) is a 3D reconstruction and modeling software. It is multiplatform, free (but not open source) tool for academic research and teaching.

Here is how to proceed, using Free-D:

1. Segmentation:

* load (a collection of) individual 3d stacks

* (optional for serial sections) perform a 2D registration to align image slices

* segment/reconstruct 3D contours using snakes

* segment 3D spots

2. Construct average cell:

* normalize the contours to compute a average cell, by registering/warping 3D contours/surfaces

3. Quantification:

* project each individual cell to the average one

* build density maps to analyze (cartography)

A few notes for current software version (till 10/2016):

* input file format: tiff (not able to import bioformats)

* currently results are saved in customized format, but there is an exportor to convert this format into fiji readable one

* import already generated contours is on the software's TODO list

neuTube is a collection of neuron reconstruction tools from fluorescence microscope images. It has an interactive system with a 3D viewer, which can be clicked in 3D and perform neuron tracing automatically and semi-automatically. It can automatically recognize branching points as junctions. Traced neurons can be exported to swc format, which could be imported by various software packages. neuTube has Win and Mac OS standalone executable builds and may also be installed by manual compilation. In addition, neuTube can be used as a plugin in Vaa3D.

Localization-based super-resolution techniques open the door to unprecedented analysis of molecular organization. This task often involves complex image processing adapted to the specific topology and quality of the image to be analyzed. SR-Tesseler is an open-source segmentation software using Voronoï tessellation constructed from the coordinates of localized molecules. It allows precise, robust and automatic quantification of protein organization at different scales, from the cellular level down to clusters of a few fluorescent markers. SR-Tesseler is insensitive to cell shape, molecular organization, background and noise, allowing comparing efficiently different biological conditions in a non-biased manner, and perform quantifications on various proteins and cell types. SR-Tesseler software comes with a very simple and intuitive graphical user interface, providing direct visual feedback of the results and is freely available under GPLv3 license.

# Summary VolViewer is used for viewing volume images from, for example, confocal microscopy or optical projection tomography # Features * Real-time volume rendering using an optimized 3D texture slicing algorithm. * Interactive transfer functions to independently adjust opacity and intensity for up to three data channels. * Real-time per channel thresholding, brightness and contrast operators. * On-the-fly gradient computation for local illumination. * Iso-surface computation with surface smoothing. * Section viewing in any orientation / position. * Real-time volume clipping. * 3D measurements, filters & segmentation. * Key frame interpolation for movie export. * Stereo rendering using either quad buffer or anaglyph mode. * Scripting interface to other systems, e.g. Matlab, OMERO, etc. # Project Status * Not supported anymore # Source code * [Source code](https://github.com/ut666/VolViewer "GitHub repository")

Pandore is a standardized library of image processing operators. The current version contains image processing operators that operate on grayscale, color and multispectral, 1D, 2D and 3D images.

Link: Operator Index

ISE-MeshTools is a software designed by Renaud Lebrun, from the university of Montpellier II. ISE-MeshTools is a system for the processing and editing of series of 3D triangular meshes. The system provides a set of tools for editing, positioning, deforming, labelling, measuring and rendering sets of 3D meshes. Features include: • Retrodeformation for un-deforming fossils/deformed specimens • Point and curve primitives for placing the exact type of landmark points you’re interested in • Easy to use 3D interface for positioning and manipulating sets of surfaces and landmark primitives • Mesh tagging, labelling and colouring (to allow for the creation of anatomy atlases) • Mesh scalar computation and colouring (based upon curvature/thickness etc...) Lebrun, R., ISE-MeshTools, a 3D interactive fossil reconstruction freeware., 12th Annual Meeting of EAVP, Torino, Italy ; 06/2014

Priism is an image processing, analysis and visualisation application for multidimensional light and electron microscopy data. It uses the Image Visualization Environment (IVE) library, which is a closed-source C library with documented C and FORTRAN APIs. Priism/IVE was developed at UCSF, and can be obtained free of charge by sending an email request to the developers. Many of the same processing and analysis functions available in other image processing applications can be found here (cropping, resizing, spatial filters, Fourier transforms, segmentation etc.), and it includes a comprehensive html-based offline manual. The "SoftWoRx" package of GE Healthcare (formerly Applied Precision) was based on Priism/IVE.

The rapidSTORM project is an open source evaluation tool that provides fast and highly configurable data processing for single-molecule localization microscopy such as dSTORM. It provides both two-dimensional and three-dimensional, multi-color data analysis as well as a wide range of filtering and image generation capabilities. The general operation of rapidSTORM is described in Wolter et al (2012).

[as of 20180524, the website is temporary not functioning do to web defacement - please check again later] This tutorial will exemplify basic rapidSTORM usage by showing how to convert an Andor SIF acquisition to a super-resoluted image with rapidSTORM.

This workflow classifies, or segments, the pixels of an image given user annotations. It is especially suited if the objects of interests are visually (brightness, color, texture) distinct from their surrounding. Users can iteratively select pixel features and provide pixel annotations through a live visualization of selected feature values and current prediction responses. Upon users' satisfaction, the workflow then predicts the remaining unprocessed image(s) regions or new images (as batch processing). Users can export (as images of various formats): selected features, annotations, predicted classification probability, simple segmentation, etc. This workflow is often served as one of the first step options for other workflows offered by ilastik, such as object classification, automatic tracking.

This workflow classifies objects based on object-level features (e.g. intensity based, morphology based, etc) and user annotations. It needs segmentation images besides the raw image data. Segmentation images can be obtained from ilastik pixel classification, or binary segmentation images from other tools. Within the object classification, one can prefilter objects through thresholds (on pixel probability image) or object sizes (on segmentation image). Outputs are predicted classification label images. Selected features can also be exported. Advanced users also have possibilities to add customized (object) features for classification in a simple plugin fashion through python scripts.

A commercial image analysis software. It's interface allows to easily perform measurements and image analysis. Your actions can be recorded and a macro (in a basic script language) can then be created. Almost no knowledge in programming is needed. You can also use python. A SDK is also available to develop stand alone applications in c++. Additional modules allow to use specific operations (3D operators... Examples of available categories of operators : filtering, edge detection, mathematical morphology, segmentation, Frequency operations, mathematical/logical operations, measurements...

An exponential curve fitting library used for Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging (FLIM) and Spectral Lifetime Imaging (SLIM), available as:

• Source code as C/C++ and Java library

• ImageJ plugin

• Standalone Open-Source Windows application

Publications:

• Barber, P.R., Proc. SPIE, 5700, 2005.pdf
• Barber, P.R., J. R. Soc. Interface, 6, 2009.pdf

ITK is an open-source, cross-platform system that provides developers with an extensive suite of software tools for image analysis.

Developed through extreme programming methodologies, ITK employs leading-edge algorithms for registering and segmenting multidimensional data. It is widely used and contributed in the medical imaging field.

Strengths

Highly optimized C++, well commented Consistently updated (new) algorithms many tools and softwares are built upon it connected with VTK Insight Journal (open code and sample data) Extensive list of examples & tutorials

Limitations

yet detached from the bioimage analysis world hard to use for end users without development skills

This library gives the numpy-based infrastructure functions for image processing with a focus on bioimage informatics. It provides image filtering and morphological processing as well as feature computation (both image-level features such as Haralick texture features and SURF local features). These can be used with other Python-based libraries for machine learning to build a complete analysis pipeline.

Mahotas is appropriate for users comfortable with programming or builders of end-user tools.

==== Strengths

The major strengths are in speed and quality of documentation. Almost all of the functionality is implemented in for multiple dimensions. It can be used with other Python packages which provide additional functionality.

Mahotas and all packages on which it relies are open-source.

OMERO is a free, open source image management software. It is client-server based system which supports 5D images, including big images and high-content screening data. Data are stored on a server using relational database. They are accessed using 3 main clients, a desktop client, a web client and a command line tool. There are bindings from OMERO to other image analysis packages, like FLIMfit, OMERO.searcher. The data in OMERO are organized in groups. A user can be a member of one or more groups. This groups can be collaborative or private, there are 4 levels of permissions to access/edit/annotate/delete the data of other users.

The package is supported not only by community forums, but also by a dedicated team which helps users to solve their problems and deals with the bugs submitted via error submission system.

###Strengths

Open source, scalable software, Supports diverse sets of imaging applications and domains (EM,LM, HCS, DigPath) Cross-platform, Java-based application, API support for Java, Python, C++, Django, On-line Forums, Automatic QA and upload of software errors Multi-dimensional images, Web access, Free Demo-server accounts

Limitations

Enterprise-scale software, so complex install, requires expertise, Actively developing API, Python scripts and functions still developing

mahotas.convolve(f, weights, mode='reflect', cval=0.0, out={new array})

Convolution of f and weights

Convolution is performed in doubles to avoid over/underflow, but the result is then cast to f.dtype. This conversion may result in over/underflow when using small integer types or unsigned types (if the output is negative). Converting to a floating point representation avoids this issue:

c = convolve(f.astype(float), kernel)

VIGRA is a free C++ and Python library that provides fundamental image processing and analysis algorithms. Its generic architecture allows it to be used in many different application contexts and ecosystems. It is designed as an intelligent library (using the C++ template mechanism) which allows users to write code at a fairly high level of abstraction and optimizes away the abstraction overhead upon compilation. It can therefore work efficiently on very large data and forms the basis of ilastik and CellCognition.

Strengths: open source, high quality algorithms, unlimited array dimension, arbitrary pixel types and number of channels, high speed, well tested, very flexible, easy-to-use Python bindings, support for many common file formats (including HDF5)

Limitations: no GUI, C++ not suitable for everyone, BioFormats not supported, parallelization requires external control

Images and Multi-dimensional Arrays: templated image data structures for arbitrary pixel types, fixed-size vectors multi-dimensional arrays for arbitrary high dimensions pre-instantiated images with many different scalar and vector valued pixel types (byte, short, int, float, double, complex, RGB, RGBA etc.) 2-dimensional image iterators, multi-dimensional iterators for arbitrary high dimensions, adapters for various image and array subsets

input/output of many image file formats: Windows BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PNM, Sun Raster, TIFF (including 32bit integer, float, and double pixel types and multi-page TIFF), Khoros VIFF, HDR (high dynamic range), Andor SIF, OpenEXR input/output of images with transparency (alpha channel) into suitable file formats. comprehensive support for HDF5 (input/output of arrays in arbitrary dimensions)

continuous reconstruction of discrete images using splines: Just create a SplineImageView of the desired order and access interpolated values and derivative at any real-valued coordinate.

Image Processing: STL-style image processing algorithms with functors (e.g. arithmetic and algebraic operations, gamma correction, contrast adaptation, thresholding), arbitrary regions of interest using mask images image resizing using resampling, linear interpolation, spline interpolation etc.

geometric transformations: rotation, mirroring, arbitrary affine transformations automated functor creation using expression templates

color space conversions: RGB, sRGB, R'G'B', XYZ, Lab*, Luv*, Y'PbPr, Y'CbCr, Y'IQ, and Y'UV real and complex Fourier transforms in arbitrary dimensions, cosine and sine transform (via fftw) noise normalization according to Förstner computation of the camera magnitude transfer function (MTF) via the slanted edge technique (ISO standard 12233)

Filters: 2-dimensional and separable convolution, Gaussian filters and their derivatives, Laplacian of Gaussian, sharpening etc. separable convolution and FFT-based convolution for arbitrary dimensional data resampling convolution (input and output image have different size) recursive filters (1st and 2nd order), exponential filters non-linear diffusion (adaptive filters), hourglass filter total-variation filtering and denoising (standard, higer-order, and adaptive methods)

tensor image processing: structure tensor, boundary tensor, gradient energy tensor, linear and non-linear tensor smoothing, eigenvalue calculation etc. (2D and 3D) distance transform (Manhattan, Euclidean, Checker Board norms, 2D and 3D) morphological filters and median (2D and 3D) Loy/Zelinsky symmetry transform Gabor filters

Segmentation: edge detectors: Canny, zero crossings, Shen-Castan, boundary tensor corner detectors: corner response function, Beaudet, Rohr and Förstner corner detectors tensor based corner and junction operators

region growing: seeded region growing, watershed algorithm

Image Analysis: connected components labeling (2D and 3D) detection of local minima/maxima (including plateaus, 2D and 3D) tensor-basesd image analysis (2D and 3D) powerful incremental computation of region and object statistics

3-dimensional Image Processing and Analysis: point-wise transformations, projections and expansions in arbitrary high dimensions all functors (e.g. regions statistics) readily apply to higher dimensional data as well separable convolution and FFT-based convolution filters, resizing, morphology, and Euclidean distance transform for arbitrary dimensional arrays (not just 3D) connected components labeling, seeded region growing, watershed algorithm for volume data

Machine Learning: random forest classifier with various tree building strategies variable importance, feature selection (based on random forest) unsupervised decomposition: PCA (principle component analysis) and pLSA (probabilistic latent semantic analysis)

Mathematical Tools: special functions (error function, splines of arbitrary order, integer square root, chi square distribution, elliptic integrals) random number generation rational and fixed point numbers quaternions polynomials and polynomial root finding matrix classes, linear algebra, solution of linear systems, eigen system computation, singular value decomposition

optimization: linear least squares, ridge regression, L1-constrained least squares (LASSO, non-negative LASSO, least angle regression), quadratic programming

Inter-language support: Python bindings in both directions (use Python arrays in C++, call VIGRA functions from Python) Matlab bindings of some functions