Automated

OMERO is an image database application consisting of a server and several clients, the most important of which are the web client and _Insight_ java application. Metadata are extracted from images that have been imported (either using the Insight client, or directly from the filesystem), and this is accessible for search. A standardised hierarchy of _Project > Dataset > Image_ in which image thumbnails can be viewed, combined with group membership, tagging, and attachment of results and other files gives a powerful framework for organising scientific image data. Images can also be analysed server-side or client-side within the base OMERO application or one of its many extensions. OMERO has APIs for extension in multiple languages: java, python, C++ and MATLAB; and such extensions have easy access to the image data and metadata in the database.

CellX is an open-source software package of workflow template for cell segmentation, intensity quantification, and cell tracking on a variety of microscopy images with distinguishable cell boundary.

Installation and step-by-step usage details are described in Mayer et al (2013). 

After users provide a few annotations of cell sizes and cell boundary profiles, it tries to match boundary profile pattern on cells thus provide segmentation and further tracking. It works the best on cells without extreme shapes and with a rather homogeneous boundary pattern. It may not work well on images with cells of sizes only a few pixels. Its output comprises control images for visual validation, text files for post-processing statistics, and MATLAB objects for advanced subsequent analysis.

This macro recognizes wells in a picture from a multi-well plate (it works also on a picture of a single well). It is used to segment a picture to determine the number of "Colony Forming Units" in each individual well of a plate.

The steps are the following:

1. Makes a 8-bit B&W picture, inverts it (=> borders will look white instead of black), resizes it (optional, this is to speed-up convolution thereafter) and find edges.
2. Convolves the obtained picture with a kernel corresponding to a thick white circle of the size of the wells. The resulting image has big "blobs" or "particles" corresponding roughly to the centers of the well.
3. The image is thresholded to remove particles not corresponding to strong hits and "Analyze particle" is run.
4. The measured parameter is the center of mass of the particles which gives the center of the well. These are saved in an array.
5. Circles are drawn and added to the ROI manager. The centers of the circles are the identified centers of mass of the particles and their radius is the expected radius of the wells in the original image.

Image processing library for Python >The scikit-image SciKit (toolkit for SciPy) extends scipy.ndimage to provide a versatile set of image processing routines. It is written in the Python language. This SciKit is developed by the SciPy community. All contributions are most welcome!

This protocol takes a folder containing images as input and extract each channel in a separate sub folder.