Oxford Instruments Imaris for Cancer Research image analysis software

Imaris for Cancer Research, by Oxford Instruments, is a software package for researchers who want to visualise their microscopy data (up to hundreds of gigabytes) and study tumour samples in cell cultures, spheroids or tissues. For time-lapse datasets, the software offers tracking algorithms including cell division events and integrated tools to plot all measurements synchronised with cell divisions.

The package enables visualisation and virtual dissection of 3D data. It includes a variety of spatial interaction measurements, such as distribution of objects around a surface, shortest distance, volume overlap and nearest neighbour analysis. All measurements are highly reproducible and can be performed in the batch mode (automatically repeat the same analysis protocol for multiple samples) to save valuable time on the analysis.

Users can conduct motion analysis, machine learning or statistics-based object classification, measure interactions between objects, or do this all on many samples in a batch mode. Each analysis eventually leads to the creation of an analytical plot showing the dependencies between objects.

At certain stages of searching for and evaluating new cancer therapies — including chemotherapy, immunotherapy and radiotherapy — using cell cultures or spheroids, researchers choose fluorescence microscopy to visualise the subtle and dynamic interaction and changes in the system. The software can open and visualise microscopy datasets in all formats and offers novel segmentation/object detection tools (like Spots and Surfaces) to visualise and understand the sample in 3D.