Imaris

Imaris is a software for data visualization, analysis, segmentation and interpretation of 3D and 4D microscopy images. It performs interactive volume rendering that lets users freely navigate even very large datasets (hundreds of GB). It performs both manual and automated detection and tracking of biological “objects” such as cells, nuclei, vesicles, neurons, and many more. ImarisSpots for example is a tool to detect “spherical objects” and track them in time series. Besides the automated detection it gives the user the ability to manually delete and place new spots in 3D space. ImarisCell is a tool to detect nuclei, cell boundaries and vesicles and track these through time. ImarisFilament is a module that lets users trace neurons and detect spines. For any detected object Imaris computes a large set of statistics values such as volume, surface area, maximum intensity of first channel, number of vesicles per cell etc. These values can be exported to Excel and statistics software packages. The measurements can also be analyzed directly within ImarisVantage which is a statistics tool that provides the link back to the 3D objects and the original image data. Strengths: - good visualization - user friendly interface - reads most microscopy file formats - image analysis workflows are very easy to apply - interactive editing of objects to correct errors during automatic detection - large data visualization (hundreds of GB)