Workshops

Workshop, Oslo (Norway), 2014

About BioVoxxel courses:

BioVoxxel Workshop – “Processing and Analysis of Scientific Images”

The course consists of different basic hands-on modules which deal with scientifically correct image editing, basic image processing methods as well as standard image analyses (counting, size and shape measurements, selection creation and intensity measurements). The course content has a focus on micrographs and fluorescent microscopical images. It is constantly reviewed and updated to keep up with the rapidly changing data acquisition and analysis necessities as well as scientific ethics guideline suggestions.

This course enables life scientists to get a better understanding of typical image processing techniques and clear guidance on image editing for publication figures.

BioVoxxel Workshop – “Advanced Image Analysis and Macro Scripting”

This course builds up on the basic workshop and gives an detailed insight into ImageJ macro scripting to allow participants to automate their image processing and analyses tasks. The second part concentrates on specific image analysis topics according to the participants main interest as queried in advance. This will increase the value and benefit for each participant.

All participant imaging data discussed during the workshop will be treated as confidential!

Also see: Current workshop dates and references

Want to have a glance at a specialized workshop, see here: BioVoxxel @ Imagej Conference 2015, Madison (WI), USA

Course Features:

Acquire practical skills making your daily work more efficient
Courses are:
- Tailored for PhD-Students and PostDocs in Life Sciences
- Available as individual 2-, 2.5- and 3-day courses
- Individualized workshop program and specific solutions
- In-house workshop at your institute
- In English and German (course material in English)
No commercial software necessary
High quality scientific software will be provided and introduced
Scientific ethics in image data handling
How to extract most information from your imaging data
Basics in macro programming to allow efficient standardized analyses
Extensive hands-on sessions and practical exercises
Detailed course skript and free software add-ons included
Participation in the BioVoxxel workshop can be certified

Detailed information and prices can be retrieved by contacting BioVoxxel.

Information for participants:

Due to high diversity in participants research questions we cannot discuss specific participants’ analyses in detail
If you have specific questions or would like to get some suggestions on your image data and its analysis, please bring some example images to the course. only by looking at images, BioVoxxel cann give suggestions.
Participant imaging data will be treated as confidential!
bring your own laptop!
bring a computer mouse for better handling (working on the touchpad is not recommended)

Why is education in scientific image handling, processing and analysis important?

Scientific digital imaging is very diverse with a huge range of methods and resulting images. The final goal of all scientists is to publish the data in a renowned journal in their field of research. One essential part in publications is to present data in form of figures. Therefore, a least biased choice of representative images of the experiment is already the first critical step (besides prior proper imaging device adjustment and proper image acquisition techniques). Thereafter, images are often subject to editing. The reason/intention for the image editing should already be questioned. Is it applied to improve visibility of features, to direct the observers view to specific regions, to get rid of “ugly background” or dirt from the sample preparation or to underscore points for or against a hypothesis?

Mostly, image editing (as well as image analysis) is done based on good intentions but influenced by natural bias (e.g. our visual system [1]) and often a lack of sound knowledge in image processing techniques. Not seldom, this leads to alterations in the image data which very quickly might be considered as misrepresentation of data. The Office of Research Integrity (ORI) figured out that from all cases they opened in 2007-2008 for investigation against potential scientific misconduct 68% included image data manipulation [2].
Of consideration is the fact that images we take in science ARE precious data and need to be handled as such [3].

In the last years the awareness in this field increased and the number of journals explicitly stating strict image data related guidelines and enforcing compliance is (too) slowly increasing.
Additionally, several whitepapers with a common tenor of suggested guidelines for image processing of scientific images are available [4], [5], [6], [7], [8].

Besides those guidelines the education of young scientists in image processing, analysis, handling of scientific images and publication ethics is essential. BioVoxxel is dedicated to communicate skills in good scientific practice regarding digital images to the scientific community to help preventing unintentional image data alterations (see below).

Furthermore, BioVoxxel offers consulting services regarding the assessment of image manipulation