SEATTLE and DUNDEE, United Kingdom, Aug. 2, 2022 — Today the Open Microscopy Environment (OME) and Glencoe Software announced the latest versions of OMERO and OMERO Plus with support for OME-NGFF, a cloud-friendly data format optimized for multi-dimensional bioimaging datasets.
This technology is designed to make working with bioimaging data in cloud deployments easier, faster and more cost effective. “These tools make a dedicated cloud strategy now a realistic alternative for academic and industrial R&D programs that rely on digital pathology, multiplexed imaging, and high content screening,” the organizations said.
OME’s Next-Generation File Formats (OME-NGFF) are a new technology for storing large bioimage datasets, for example, data collected in Digital Pathology and High Content Screening, in cloud storage systems (often called “object” or “blob” storage). This new data storage technology enables data and AI scientists to access specific regions of large image datasets efficiently, effectively a kind of data streaming that removes the need to download large image files to a local machine for use in advanced AI calculations.
OMERO and OMERO Plus are world-leading platforms that combine databases and powerful data interfaces that let scientists view, manage, share, analyze, mine and publish data. With support for the OME-NGFF format, OMERO and OMERO Plus now provide the option of cloud-native deployments for data management at scale, while maintaining support for diverse domains such as Microscopy, Digital Pathology, and High Content Screening.
Chris Allan, Glencoe Software‘s VP Software Engineering, comments that “as many IT departments are moving their operations to the cloud, scientists are left with limited tooling in the bioimaging domain that operates natively with scalable cloud storage and compute. OME-NGFF changes that, and makes cloud deployments a viable alternative for academic and industrial life sciences and biomedical R&D labs.”
The Open Microscopy Environment produces open source tools to support data management for microscopy with a commitment to building and releasing high quality, open source, well-supported software for the scientific imaging community. OMEs Bio-Formats and OMERO projects are funded by peer-reviewed grants and are undertaken as collaborations with academic, industrial or commercial partners, so that the development of new tools and capabilities is always tied to real world, scientific use cases. Open source OMERO is publicly available.
Glencoe Software is the exclusive commercial partner of the Open Microscopy Environment.
