The Center for Open Bioimage Analysis (COBA) is supported by a P41 grant from the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences to Co-PIs Cimini & Carpenter (Broad) and Eliceiri (UW-Madison). 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 through two main efforts. 

COBA will continue to develop and maintain the open-source software CellProfiler and ImageJ while making new deep learning tools and workflow solutions for bioimaging.  All of this computational work will be developed in the context of driving biological projects
from the community.