Automated

The Sholl technique is used to describe neuronal arbors. This plugin can perform Sholl directly on 2D and 3D grayscale images of isolated neurons. Its internal algorithm to collect data is based upon how Sholl analysis is done by hand — it creates a series of concentric shells (circles or spheres) around the focus of a neuronal arbor, and counts how many times connected voxels defining the arbor intersect the sampling shells. The major advantages of this plugin over other implementations are:

• When analyzing images directly, it does not require previous tracing of the arbor (although it can also analyze traced arbors)
• It combines curve fitting with several methods to automatically retrieve quantitative descriptors from sampled data, which allows direct statistical comparisons between arbors
• It allows continuous and repeated sampling around user-defined foci
• It allows batch processing

Bio-Formats is a standalone Java library for reading and writing life sciences image file formats. It is capable of parsing both pixels and metadata for a large number of formats, as well as writing to several formats. The primary goal of Bio-Formats is to facilitate the exchange of microscopy data between different software packages and organizations. It achieves this by converting proprietary microscopy data into an open standard called the OME Data Model, particularly into the OME-TIFF file format. ### Command Line Tools Bioformats could also be used as stand alone application from command line. See [Bioformats command line tools introduction.](http://www.openmicroscopy.org/site/support/bio-formats5/users/comlineto…)