Fabulous ELMI 2024!

This year, the European Light Microscopy Initiative meeting took place from June 3-7 in Liverpool, United Kingdom, organised by the Royal Microscopy Society. We were delighted to share Booth #1 with BioImagingUK, represented by Georgina Fletcher and other staff from our UK Node. Several Euro-BioImaging Hub team members were there, enjoying the science, the workshops, and the exchanges with our Nodes, friends, community and industry partners! 

Here are some highlights from the week:

Data Management session of the Core facility day 

We loved hearing from our Nodes and other partners about the strategies they are employing to manage large volumes of data being produced with new microscopy capabilities, in integrated systems across different institutions. In this session, co-chaired by Johanna Bischof, Euro-BioImaging’s data team members Aastha Mathur and Bugra Oezdemir presented what Euro-BioImaging offers in terms of image data analysis services at the Nodes, tools to help with image data analysis and NGFFs, FAIR data management and data stewardship, and introduced steps towards a Global Image Data Ecosystem via the foudingGIDE project. 

Core facility Day & Booth #1

Global BioImaging Community Room

We enjoyed hosting the “Global BioImaging: Accelerating Collaboration and Innovation through Data Dialogue” Community Room, a one-hour workshop to exchange on the current global landscape of image data sharing. Organised by Aastha Mathur, Matthew Hartley, and Shuichi Onami, this session spread the word about the foundingGIDE project, the Global BioImaging working Group on Image Data, and new Global BioImaging initiative to coordinate diverse metadata efforts in the community. We all look forward to cultivating a shared understanding of best practices, bridging isolated initiatives to create an ecosystem where image data becomes a universally accessible resource.

Wednesday evening Poster session

Aastha Mathur presented a poster on “foundingGIDE: Founding a Global Image Data Ecosystem,” Beatriz Serrano-Solano presented a poster on “AI4Life: Empowering life scientists with AI-driven image analysis” and Bugra Ozdemir presented a poster on “EuBiFlow: A flexible software to create and execute Nextflow-based image processing workflows on OME-Zarr data.” Many thanks to all who stopped by for the interesting discussions!

Updates from Euro-BioImaging 

On Thursday just before lunch Johanna Bischof presented some of the opportunities available to researchers from Euro-BioImaging in a talk entitled, “How Euro-BioImaging can support your research with access to the best imaging tools.” Her talk included a complete overview of the Euro-BioImaging infrastructure, the user access process as well as funding opportunities for imaging projects at Euro-BioImaging Nodes via the CanSERV, ISIDORe and AgroServ projects. She mentioned training opportunities for Euro-BioImaging Node staff that will be funded through the EVOLVE project, the Euro-BioImaging Data Services and also presented news and updates from the Global BioImaging community, including a highlight on the recently published paper on Career Paths for Imaging Core Facility staff and the upcoming Imaging4All programme. Many thanks to everyone who attended!

Updates from Euro-BioImaging & Global BioImaging

And more… 

We really enjoyed the enthusiasm about AI4Life. Our project partners Ivan Hidalgo and Matthew Hartley presented work supported by AI4Life in their posters, and we were delighted to hear Florian Jug highlight AI4Life in the AI Revolution Session on Thursday morning. And we were blown away by the exciting science going on at core facilities across Europe and the world.

Thanks to our Nodes & partners for their enthusiasm and efforts to promote Euro-BioImaging throughout the event. We also want to recognize the hard work of the organizing committee & thank the sponsors of the event. It was a wonderful ELMI conference!  Looking forward to next year’s ELMI event in Heidelberg. 

Thanks to Camilo Guzman, Susanne Vainio and Daniela Aviles-Huerta for representing Euro-BioImaging at ELMI this week and providing the photos.