About
We started a project for a new open-source image processing software platform dedicated to community work (de Chaumont et al, Nature Methods 2012). It includes a flexible framework designed around and with a native plugin architecture, offers rich data structures for images and output data, enhanced data visualization and communication layers. It is a multi-platform software framework bundled with a web 2.0 collaborative website designed to centralize plugins and to provide monitoring, distribution and promotion of plugins (http://www.bioimageanalysis.org). By being open source software, it also means all its source code can be made available and can be freely used respecting the GPL license. Since the first official release, successive upgrades have increased the number of available plugins and resources. Icy is having a major impact worldwide as can be seen from the hitmap in Figure 1 and a growing number of labs have already adopted Icy as one of their standard tools for image analysis. In particular, Icy has become one of the common platforms of research and development in image analysis for the national Infrastructure FranceBioImaging project, which brings together the most advanced groups in biological imaging research in France (http://www. francebioimaging.org). Icy provides the software resources to visualize, annotate and quantify bioimaging data.http://icy.bioimageanalysis.org/