Section: Overall Objectives

Scientific context and motivations

During the past two decades, biological imaging has undergone a revolution in the development of new microscopy techniques that allow visualization of tissues, cells, proteins and macromolecular structures at all levels of resolution, physiological states, chemical composition and dynamics. Thanks to recent advances in optics, digital sensors and labeling probes (e.g., Colored Fluorescence Protein), one can now visualize sub-cellular components and organelles at the scale of several hundreds of nanometers to a tens nanometers, in live. As a result, fluorescent microscopy and multimodal imaging (fluorophores at various wavelengths) have become the workhorse of modern biology. As a matter of fact, taking into account all the publications in the 10 most relevant journals in fundamental biology (those with highest IF) for the last 2018-2019 years, the ratio of experimental figures based on BioImage data is close to 70% (GBI EoE.V, Singapour, Sep 2019). All the technological advances in microscopy have created new issues and challenges for researchers in quantitative image processing and analysis. Since the digital processing is now part of the imaging loop, image processing may even drive imaging. A brilliant example of this shift in paradigm is super-resolution localization microscopy (PALM, STED), which was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.