Abstract

The Open Microscopy Environment (OME) Analysis System is software that supports modelling and enacting workflows for the quantitative analysis of microscopy images. This system is based on OME – an extensible infrastructure with plug-in ontologies for managing large sets of biological images and data. Integrated into the analysis system is a multi-purpose image classifier for scoring high content screens (HCS) and other high throughput imaging applications. The image classification workflow is composed of 53 nodes with 189 links that output 1025 numerical values modeled as 48 ontological terms. Nodes are MATLAB scripts, with unaltered source code, around which XML execution instructions wrappers have been written to incorporate the scripts into OME . Users can convert their legacy image analysis tools into OME workflows or customize the integrated image classification workflow to suit their task-specific needs.

The OME Analysis System has been validated on an example high content, high throughput experiment called the Atlas of Gene Expression in Mouse Aging Project (AGEMAP). The AGEMAP dataset is ~30,000 microscope images of mouse livers, skeletal muscles, and kidney tubules. Beginning with 18GB of raw pixels, it took the OME approximately 2000 processor hours (luckily, OME supports distributed computation) to generate 125GB of intermediary pixels and extract 90 million image descriptor features used for classification.

In this presentation I will briefly introduce high content, high throughput biological imaging, describe the design and development of OME as well its validation (including performance) on AGEMAP , and conclude by mentioning some of the biological insights we learned about aging from the AGEMAP analysis.