Celebrating one year of successful collaboration around BAND Virtual Desktop!

The BioImage ANalysis Desktop (BAND) is an easy to use, 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. Thanks to a successful collaboration between Euro-BioImaging and EGI Federation members CESNET and GRNET since April 2025, BAND, with additional dedicated resources, is available to researchers across the globe and has proven to be a game-changer for successfully implementing image analysis training courses. To ensure this tool remains available to the community, Euro-BioImaging and EGI have renewed their service level agreement for the next year and will continue to offer access to this amazing resource to anyone working with image data and specially support running advanced training courses on image data management and analysis. 

“BAND has been used in 10 training courses to over 230 users between April 2025 and February 2026,” says Bugra Oezdemir, Image Data Specialist at Euro-BioImaging ERIC, and a contributor to BAND’s image analysis and training ecosystem. “In these cases, BAND made it possible for image analysis trainers to provide identical learning environments to trainees across continents. Whether the students were in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, or the Americas, they all had the same desktop environment and access to the same tools and workflows via BAND.” 

10

Training courses used BAND for image analysis in 2025-2026

230

Users of BAND Virtual Desktop between April 2025-February 2026

120

Virtual cloud CPU cores provided by CESNET to support BAND

An important tool for image data analysis training courses

The original BAND desktop was developed as part of the Euro-BioImaging involvement in the EOSC-Life project, by Jean-Karim Heriche and Yi Sun from EMBL. Since then, it has been extensively used in training courses by EMBL and various other Euro-BioImaging Nodes. The partnership with EGI Federation has made it possible to continue provision, and widen access to this important resource. 

"There are always course participants who do not download and set up the necessary software in advance, and catching them up consumes valuable teaching time. BAND is a game changer. Having the machines ready and set up has allowed us to get straight to teaching, and provides a more uniform experience for all participants. Knowing the computer environment ahead of time also makes it possible to prepare a much more specific and streamlined course programme", says Dr. Benedikt Best, EMBL Heidelberg.

“We used BAND in an LMIC setting with the majority of people who had never done image analysis before. BAND enabled the use of CellPose and Stardist to segment pathogenic yeasts, moulds and label-free immune cells, which would have been very difficult if not almost impossible otherwise. Now these researchers from all over Africa will be using these tools with almost no barrier now. Really can't commend BAND enough!” says Darren Thompson, University of Exeter, co-organiser, with Caron Jacobs, of an image analysis course organised at Cape Town University.

“I’ve used the BAND platform for several training courses until now, and each time it’s been a great experience. Having instant access to GPU-equipped virtual machines is invaluable when working with modern deep learning segmentation methods. It removes all the usual hardware barriers and lets us focus on teaching state-of-the-art approaches. The support team was excellent too, responding quickly even outside regular office hours. It’s exactly the kind of infrastructure we need for effective training courses,” says Ilya Belevich, Senior Researcher and Electron Microscopy specialist at the EMBI core facility, University of Helsinki, part of Euro-BioImaging’s FiAM Node. 

An important partnership with EGI

The incredibly positive feedback from course organisers is a strong motivation for Euro-BioImaging and EGI Federation partners to continue to work together. In particular, CESNET provides 120 virtual Cloud CPU cores, 10 GPUs, and 5 TB of Online Storage to Euro-BioImaging, while GRNET ensures secure authentication via EGI Check-in. Without these resources, it would not be possible to run BAND and support the impactful training activities of the research community. 

“At EGI we have very much enjoyed the collaboration with Euro-BioImaging for the deployment of BAND since the beginning. It all started with a pilot deployment of BAND, and once it was successfully validated in a first training course, we agreed to extend this joint effort further thanks to the involvement of CESNET and GRNET, two of the EGI Federation members. EGI is proud of the high number of trainees across the globe that are benefiting from the use of BAND to learn new skills via seamless access to a predictable working environment”, says Sebastian Luna-Valero, Cloud Community Support Specialist at EGI Foundation.

We look forward to continuing this important partnership with EGI and expanding the network of happy users of the BAND Virtual Desktop, while increasing image analysis capacity amongst life science researchers and imaging scientists worldwide.