Editorial: Methods and Tools for Bioimage Analysis

Florian Levet, Virginie Uhlmann, Florian Jug

Abstract: A core purpose of biological imaging data is the quantification of complex phenomena through bioimage analysis. Recent advances in our ability to observe living systems, enabling life scientists to monitor the dynamics of biological phenomena across spatiotemporal scales and at high resolution, have led to a much increased demand for methods and tools to analyze microscopy data. In many scientific projects in the life sciences, the bottleneck has now shifted from not having the technology to image interesting phenomena to not being able to extract information from the unfathomable amounts of image data acquired during said imaging experiments.Historically, Bioimage Analysis operates in between the disciplines of computer science, physics, microscopy, medicine, and biology, presenting a rather unique set of challenges on various levels. With growing demands, the community grew, and saw the emergence of national and international networks such as NEUBIAS (http://eubias.org/NEUBIAS/), COBA (https://openbioimageanalysis.org/), or BINA (https://www.bioimagingnorthamerica.org/), all aiming at connecting bioimage analysis researchers, helping them to better align their interest, and ultimately be more efficient and less redundant. This has also helped this community to better understand what its strengths are, and where bioimage analysis methods are still missing.An interesting and quite unique aspect of our work as Bioimage Analysts is that we need to develop not only methods bu...