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Acadia Course on Advanced Digital Image Analysis (Mt. Desert Island, ME) May 23-29, 2027

Applications are now being accepted for the inaugural Acadia Course on Advanced Digital Image Analysis (ACADIA), to be held at the Mt. Desert Island Biological Laboratory, May 23-29, 2027. The venue is only minutes away from Bar Harbor and the Acadia National Park in Maine, USA.

This workshop is jointly offered by members of Janelia’s Advanced Imaging Center, the Broad Institute's Imaging Platform, and MDIBL. It is designed to meet an important need for systematic training in quantitative microscopy image analysis. The target audience includes graduate students, postdocs, core facility personnel, and lab heads interested in expanding their expertise in designing and executing quantitative microscopy experiments.

ACADIA attendees will receive didactic instruction on fundamental concepts in image analysis as well as gain hands-on experience with processing and analyzing microscopy data through small group activities. The course will cover foundational principles of quantitative imaging, including a strong emphasis on rigorous and informative experimental design across a range of modalities, resolutions, and timescales. Specific topics covered include convolution and image filtering, object segmentation, deconvolution, colocalization, analysis of amorphous motion, particle tracking, and working with big data. The course will also introduce principles of artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) in the image analysis context, as well as demonstrate how these tools can be leveraged for object segmentation, image restoration, and extending existing microscopy hardware. Through interactive analysis labs and numerous break-out group activities, participants will have the opportunity to apply their knowledge using open-source tools including FIJI, CellProfiler, and custom Jupyter Notebooks. Industry partners will also be available for consultations on applying proprietary processing and analysis software to the participants’ research questions. Participants are expected to provide their own laptop computers for this workshop. No coding experience is necessary to participate in this course.

Curriculum highlights:

  • Images as quantitative data
  • Quantitative and informative experimental design
  • Fundamentals of image processing (background subtraction, particle detection, deconvolution)
  • Fourier transformation in image processing and optics
  • Object segmentation and shape analysis
  • Colocalization (object-based, intensity-based, phasor mixing)
  • Quantitative analysis of amorphous biological motion
  • Tracking and mathematical readouts of motile behavior
  • Working with Big Data
  • ML-based object segmentation
  • ML-based image processing (image restoration, modality translation, and more)
  • Statistics in microscopy experiments
  • Addressing bias in quantitative analysis
  • Informative visualization of bioimage data

For more information and to apply, please visit: https://mdibl.org/course/acadia-2027/

We expect the admission to be competitive, so do apply early!

Regards,
Teng-Leong Chew & Beth Cimini