Micro-Meta App: an interactive software tool to facilitate the collection of microscopy metadata based on community-driven specifications [preprint]
Authors
Hammer, MathiasBellve, Karl D.
Fogarty, Kevin E.
Grunwald, David
Strambio-De-Castillia, Caterina
Document Type
PreprintPublication Date
2021-06-01Keywords
BioinformaticsMicro-Meta App
microscopy images
metadata
bioimaging
Bioimaging and Biomedical Optics
Bioinformatics
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
For the information content of microscopy images to be appropriately interpreted, reproduced, and meet FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable) principles, they should be accompanied by detailed descriptions of microscope hardware, image acquisition settings, image pixel and dimensional structure, and instrument performance. Nonetheless, the thorough documentation of imaging experiments is significantly impaired by the lack of community-sanctioned easy-to-use software tools to facilitate the extraction and collection of relevant microscopy metadata. Here we present Micro-Meta App, an intuitive open-source software designed to tackle these issues that was developed in the context of nascent global bioimaging community organizations, including BioImaging North America (BINA) and QUAlity Assessment and REProducibility in Light Microscopy (QUAREP-LiMi), whose goal is to improve reproducibility, data quality and sharing value for imaging experiments. The App provides a user-friendly interface for building comprehensive descriptions of the conditions utilized to produce individual microscopy datasets as specified by the recently proposed 4DN-BINA-OME tiered-system of Microscopy Metadata model. To achieve this goal the App provides a visual guide for a microscope-user to: 1) interactively build diagrammatic representations of hardware configurations of given microscopes that can be easily reused and shared with colleagues needing to document similar instruments. 2) Automatically extracts relevant metadata from image files and facilitates the collection of missing image acquisition settings and calibration metrics associated with a given experiment. 3) Output all collected Microscopy Metadata to interoperable files that can be used for documenting imaging experiments and shared with the community. In addition to significantly lowering the burden of quality assurance, the visual nature of Micro-Meta App makes it particularly suited for training users that have limited knowledge of the intricacies of light microscopy experiments. To ensure wide-adoption by microscope-users with different needs Micro-Meta App closely interoperates with MethodsJ2 and OMERO.mde, two complementary tools described in parallel manuscripts.Source
bioRxiv 2021.05.31.446382; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.05.31.446382. Link to preprint on bioRxiv.
DOI
10.1101/2021.05.31.446382Permanent Link to this Item
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14038/29828Notes
This article is a preprint. Preprints are preliminary reports of work that have not been certified by peer review.
The PDF available for download is Version 3 of this preprint. The complete version history of this preprint is available at bioRxiv.
Full author list omitted for brevity. For the full list of authors, see article.
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Now published in Nature Methods, doi: 10.1038/s41592-021-01315-z
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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.Distribution License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1101/2021.05.31.446382
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Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.