PuBliCiTy: Python Bioimage Computing Toolkit

Abstract

The Python Bioimage Computing Toolkit (PuBliCiTy) is an evolving set of functions, scripts, and classes, written primarily in Python, to facilitate the analysis of biological images, of two or more dimensions, from electron or light microscopes. While the early development was guided by the goal of replacing an existing internal code-base with Python code, the effort later came to include novel tools, specially in the areas of machine learning infrastructure and model development. The toolkit is built on top of the so-called python data science stack, which includes numpy, scipy, scikit-image, scikit-learn, and pandas. It also contains some deep learning models, written in TensorFlow and PyTorch, and a web-app for image annotation, which uses Flask as the web framework. The main features of the toolkit are: (1) simplifying the interface of some routinely used functions from underlying libraries; (2) providing helpful tools for the analysis of large images; (3) providing a web interface for image annotation, which can be used remotely and on tablets with pencils; (4) providing machine learning model implementations that are easy to read, train, and deploy - written in a way that minimizes complexity for users without a computer science or software development background. The source code is released under an MIT-like license at github.com/hms-idac/PuBliCiTy. Details, tutorials, and up-to-date documentation can be found at the projects page as well. Project pagegithub.com/hms-idac/PuBliCiTy