Biomedical and computational scientists at UQ have combined to create a powerful new tool that will greatly increase the amount of data bio-scientists can expect to process in a week.

Sophisticated software that slashes the processing time required to select high-resolution images is poised to boost biomedical research around the world.

Screening processes that once demanded hundreds of hours from a skilled operator can now be done by a less-skilled operator in a fraction of the time.

The rapid semi-automated single particle selection software (SwarmPS) speeds-up the painstaking and often laborious process of selecting scientifically “significant” images from the thousands of “non-significant” images which routinely accompany them.

Incorporating cross-correlation and edge-detection algorithms, SwarmPS is an improvement on other available technologies because it uses human interaction with images to fine-tune its considerable processing power.

Queensland Brain Institute (QBI) computational scientist Dr Geoffery Ericksson said the software involved about 20,000 separate lines of computer code and had the potential to save researchers both time and money.

“Essentially, SwarmPS has been designed to provide a user-friendly, powerful and flexible graphical interface to manage and run particle selection jobs,” Dr Ericksson said.

Developed by scientists from the QBI and UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience, SwarmPS has been designed to run across most standard computer platforms.

Dr Geoffery Ericksson www.uq.edu.au/uqresearchers/researcher/erickssongb.html

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