Oxford Instruments Imaris for Cell Biologists software package

The Imaris for Cell Biologists package, from Oxford Instruments, is powerful commercial software for live cell tracking and analysis. It is suitable for researchers in life science disciplines who require a broad range of functionalities to study cells and organisms, and to monitor temporal changes in biological systems.

In addition to its 3D/4D visualisation and analysis tools, the software provides the functionality for smart cell-based segmentation, analysis on a per-cell basis and discovery of intracellular relationships. The package includes automated tracking, detection of cell division and creation of interactive lineage trees, along with statistical tests and a two-way interface for customisation in Matlab, Java or Python.

The product provides multiple options to detect and model biologically relevant structures via step-by-step wizards, with a preview of the results at each point in the workflow. After segmenting the image data, the software calculates a wide range of statistics for all detected objects: cells, surfaces and spots. All values can be used for colour coding, plotted inside Imaris (using Vantage plots) or exported in a .csv or .xls file format.

Imaris Surfaces can be used to visualise and measure organelles, nuclei, biofilms, cells, tissues, organs and embryos as well as organoids. Imaris Spots can meanwhile be used to detect particles, protein clusters, vesicles, nucleoli, nuclei, centrosomes, cells and bacteria.

Imaris Cell can be used for smart detection of cells based on cytoplasm or plasma membrane labelling; cytoplasm, nucleus, nucleoli and various populations of vesicles can be detected and analysed within a complete cell object. It can also be used for the detection of objects where the fluorescent signal is located only on their surface (i.e., with membrane or cell wall labelling only), to model the exact shape and report measurements such as volume or surface area for closely touching cells.