BAND virtual analysis desktop
BAND - a virtual desktop for bioimage analysis in the cloud
The BioImage ANalysis Desktop (BAND) is Euro-BioImaging’s dedicated virtual platform for advanced image analysis. Accessible directly through a standard web browser, BAND provides a fully equipped analysis environment with a wide range of preinstalled tools and programming frameworks.
Designed to replicate the user experience of a local workstation, BAND runs on a high-performance computing cluster, enabling efficient large-scale image processing. Many applications support GPU acceleration, allowing users to execute computationally intensive tasks such as deep learning workflows with ease.
It supports interactive, human-in-the-loop workflows and customizable desktop environments. This way, software environments for specific analysis tasks or training courses can be defined in advance.
Features
- Persistent storage: Maintain data, configurations, and outputs across sessions
- Remote access: Run advanced bioimage tools from any web browser
- GPU acceleration: Speed-up computation-heavy tasks with GPU-enabled processing
- High-performance computing: Execute slurm-based, parallelized workflows on an HPC cluster
- Cloud-storage integration: Analyze data directly from remote S3 storage
- Custom Linux environments: Configure hardware resources and software tools with specific versions
Available tools
- Fiji
- QuPath
- Napari
- CellProfiler
- Ilastik
- CellPose
- and much more
Your tool is missing? We help you make it available!
Did you know?
The BAND Desktop Service can be used to support image analysis training courses! If you like to set-up a course using BAND let us know beforehand so we can reserve capacity and help you preconfigure your setups for optimal performance.
How to use BAND
- Register for an account and login
- Specify your hardware configurations and then click on 'launch'
- When the desktop appears, click the button labelled 'go to desktop'
- Access all available applications and start analyzing
Make sure to read the user guide for detailed information on how to get started and avoid common pitfalls.
BAND use case
France-BioImaging, Swedish NMI, and PPBI Nodes contributed to the distributed in-person training course "Intro to BioImage Analysis with Python for Life Scientists" supported by the eRImote project. Held locally at these three Euro-BioImaging sites - University of Gothenburg, Institut Pasteur, and GIMM - the course connected participants and trainers at three sites via Zoom and used the BAND remote desktop so students could gain hands-on Python experience for bioimage analysis in a shared environment.
Photo courtesy of GIMM, PPBI
BAND is made possible through
History of BAND
The BioImage ANalysis Desktop (BAND) was developed within the EOSC-Life project by Jean-Karim Heriche and Yi Sun at EMBL, in collaboration with Euro-BioImaging. Drawing on components originally created for the Australian MASSIVE facility, BAND was designed as a cloud-based “Desktop-as-a-Service” platform providing a ready-to-use environment for bioimage analysis. In 2024, Euro-BioImaging continued to support and promote the platform across the scientific community, helping to expand its adoption for both research and training. Building on it's success, a new BAND instance was launched in 2025 on EGI’s CESNET Node, offering continued capacity and global accessibility. This latest deployment enables dedicated training sessions with reserved computational resources for educational and collaborative use, thus enhancing our offer to the Nodes and the whole imaging community.