Posts tagged Fiji

Ignacio Arganda, a young researcher from San Sebastián de los Reyes (Madrid) working for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the driving forces behind Fiji, an open source platform that allows for application sharing as a way of improving biomedical-image processing. Arganda explains to SINC that Fiji, which has enjoyed the voluntary collaboration of some 20 developers from all over the world, has become a de facto standard that assists laboratories and microscope companies in their development of more precise products.

Ignacio Arganda is a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory of Computational Neuroscience of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Along with a group of researchers he implemented Fiji, a platform that allows for applications to be shared in order to improve and advance in the processing and analysis of biomedical imaging. “All of this in open source,” outlines Arganda.

The platform was built from a previous one, ImageJ, which was well known in the industry at the time. ImageJ was not an open source platform but it was publicly accessible. According to Arganda, it had the advantage that any person working in medical imaging could easily create small software applications to resolve their particular problems and then incorporate it into the platform by means of a plug-in (an application which is linked to another providing a new or specific function).

Nonetheless, the researcher adds that this platform became too chaotic with applications of all kinds, some of which were not related to biomedical-imaging. It also began being used to handle astronomical images, in video tracking, etc. “There was a significant lack of control and structure,” he says.

Therefore, “in a spontaneous manner and without any help” this group of researchers decided to create the new open source platform that could put order to that already in place, reusing what was of interest and useful in their work.

"We created a webpage organised like Wikipedia where people could contribute and use their knowledge to help others. To our surprise, it became very popular," he ensures. According to Ignacio Aranda, Fiji currently has 127,000 unique visits (20,000 each month).

(Source: eurekalert.org)

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