Oxford Instruments Imaris for Core Facilities software package

Imaris for Core Facilities, from Oxford Instruments, is an analysis software package for microscopy facilities, larger labs and multi-user environments. Imaris is visualisation and analysis software for widefield, confocal (including spinning disk), light sheet, two-photon, electron microscopy, CLEM, OPT and many other modalities with over 4000 publications in 2020 alone. Imaris for Core Facilities provides smart detection and visualisation of complex objects, tracing of neurons, blood vessels and other filamentous structures, 3D tracking (including cell division detection), interactive plotting and batch analysis.

The power of the software package lies in the multiple detection models and the versatility it provides all users for their research applications. The four models (Spots, Surfaces, Cells and Filaments) can be harnessed to detect and analyse almost all biological samples, including cells, nuclei, nucleoli, bacteria, viruses, organs, neurons, dendritic spines, blood vessels and many more. Using them in combination with Imaris’s other tools opens the possibility to analyse dynamics of objects over time as well as their relationships with other objects in the image and to present these data in an elegant and informative fashion.

After detecting and segmenting the image data as objects using one of the four models, the software calculates a wide range of statistics. All values can be used for filtering, labelling or colour coding; plotted inside Imaris (using Vantage plots); or exported in a preformatted .csv or .xls file. Machine Learning Object Classification tool uses many of these values in addition to many more machine learning specific ones.

To help users share their data with collaborators or visualise their data at home or conferences, Imaris Viewer is offered — free software which enables opening both native microscopy files and datasets already analysed in Imaris.