See No Weevil

Biomedical scientists call on experience and knowledge to interpret medical scans. But image analysis is time consuming, so here computer software aims to define or 'segment' important features automatically. The new online package, called Biomedisa, sets to work on a 3D microscope image of a Trigonopterus weevil (original photo, centre), made up of a thousand 2D image 'slices', with the hope of walking through the images tracing boundaries. Some slices are pre-segmented by scientists, and act as milestones for the software to fill in the gaps. The question is: how much human help is enough? On these weevils, darker-coloured areas show where the software is successful – happening more frequently when using higher numbers of pre-segmented slices (left column), compared to fewer (right). Spotting more subtle boundaries (such as the green areas) requires a balance between human and computer analysis, which Biomedisa’s open source community will continue to improve, then apply to human tissues.

Written by John Ankers

John Ankers

Writer

A former researcher in systems biology, John is now an online biology tutor and professional coach supporting the wellbeing of scientists and NHS professionals. He's writing, too, of course.

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• Image adapted from work by Philipp D. Lösel and colleagues
• Engineering Mathematics and Computing Lab (EMCL), Interdisciplinary Center for Scientific Computing (IWR), Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Nature Communications, November 2020