Taking a Cue From Angry Birds

A group of software developers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham have designed an image analysis app that functions just like Angry Birds or Instagram.

Their new app — called ImageJS — is described in a recent paper published in the Journal of Pathology Informatics entitled "ImageJS: Personalized, participated, pervasive, and reproducible image bioinformatics in the web browser."

ImageJS allows pathologists to analyze digital pathology slides in a Web browser app where it can be analyzed for evidence of tumor cell growth.

"ImageJS" gets its name from "ImageJ," an image-analysis application developed by the National Institutes of Health that was written using the JAVA language — and which allegedly took hours to program and integrate into a hospital's patient data system.

Here's a demonstration of ImageJS:

According to the team, led by Jonas Almeida, director of the Division of Informatics in the UAB School of Medicine's Department of Pathology, the pathology modules are only the first in a series that will eventually include genomics analysis capabilities. The idea is that enabling such quick-and-easy comparisons will increase diagnostic accuracy and improve treatment plans.

Almeida and his team hope that pathologists will take this app and run with it, partnering with bioinformaticians to create other modules using the ImageJS open-source code.

ImageJS is currently available from the Google Chrome App store, Google Code and Github.

Matthew Dublin is a senior writer at Genome Technology.