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A call for bioimaging software usability

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Bioimaging software developed in a research setting often is not widely used by the scientific community. We suggest that, to maximize both the public's and researchers' investments, usability should be a more highly valued goal. We describe specific characteristics of usability toward which bioimaging software projects should aim.

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Acknowledgements

We thank members of our research groups and our software projects for helpful feedback on the manuscript, in particular CellProfiler cofounder T.R. Jones. This work was supported in part by US National Institutes of Health grants R01 GM089652 (to A.E.C.) and RC2 GM092519 (to K.W.E.), but the opinions expressed are solely those of the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Anne E. Carpenter and Lee Kamentsky are at the Imaging Platform, Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.,

    Anne E Carpenter & Lee Kamentsky

  2. Kevin W. Eliceiri is at the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Madison, Wisconsin, USA.,

    Kevin W Eliceiri

Authors
  1. Anne E Carpenter
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  2. Lee Kamentsky
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  3. Kevin W Eliceiri
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Correspondence to Anne E Carpenter or Kevin W Eliceiri.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Carpenter, A., Kamentsky, L. & Eliceiri, K. A call for bioimaging software usability. Nat Methods 9, 666–670 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2073

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