The Center for Open Bioimage Analysis (COBA) was established in 2020 with a P41 grant from the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences. As a National Biomedical Technology Research Resource, our purpose is to develop and disseminate novel technologies throughout the biomedical research community.
COBA’s mission is to serve the cell biology community’s growing need for sophisticated software for light microscopy image analysis. Quantitative image analysis has become an indispensable tool for biologists using microscopy throughout basic biological and biomedical research. Quantifying images is now a critical, widespread need as imaging experiments continue to grow in scale, size, dimensionality, scope, modality, and complexity. Many biologists are missing out on the quantitative bioimaging revolution due to lack of effective algorithms and/or usable software for their needs, or lack of access to training. We aim to change that.
The Center brings together the Cimini and Carpenter-Singh labs at the Broad Institute and the Eliceiri lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in doing so brings together two popular open-source bioimage analysis projects, ImageJ (including ImageJ2 and Fiji) and CellProfiler.
Through the collaborative development and dissemination of open-source image analysis software, as well as training events and resources, the Center seeks to empower thousands of researchers to apply advanced analytics in innovative ways to address new experimental areas.
