Bitplane Imaris 9.5 image analysis software for life science

Bitplane Imaris 9.5 is a software solution for correlative microscopy, enabling the possibility of opening multiple 2D, 3D or 4D datasets of differing spatial and temporal resolutions in the same scene. The product is designed to let the image tell its story with aesthetic rendering tools as well as improved quantitative analysis for calculating the relative distance between pairs of object populations.

The latest release has improved surface (reconstructions) rendering to catch the eye of the audience while showing more information so the presenter can spend more time discussing what the results mean rather than what the results are. It includes Surfaces and Spots material options including semi-transparent ones to help the user make eye-catching animations and snapshots.

For every Surfaces and Spots object, the software natively calculates the shortest distance to any other surfaces or spots. The edge of surfaces and the centre of spots are used for these calculations. The computation is fast and capable of running on large images. Calculations can also be performed on multiple datasets at once in Batch mode.

Distance applications include: immunology; organoid studies; tumour microenvironment; bone marrow stem cell niche; organelle distribution inside the cell; and 3D nucleus organisation.

Fast visualisation of terabyte-sized images is possible due to saving the image as a multiresolution pyramid. The software renders the image in blocks where only the resolution blocks that are required for good-quality rendering on the screen are used. That is, higher resolution data are used when blocks that are closer to the camera (or zoomed in) are rendered and lower resolution data are used when blocks are farther away.

The dynamic volume rendering during rotations and fast zooming are improved in Imaris 9.5 because each block is rendered as a mixture of two resolution levels and this mixture changes with the distance from the camera. In prior versions each block was rendered in one of the discrete resolutions available in the pyramid.