Dear microscopists, I'm very pleased to let you know that we have recently been successful with an application for the College's "equipment sharing grant", and part of of the money will pay towards two training courses for the powerful Definiens Developer XD software, one for beginners and one for advanced users. This will mean that both training courses will be available at a subsidised rate of probably ~£200-300 per participants (rates still need to be finalised, also dependent on the number of participants). Many of you have already used the Definiens software for a range of challenging image analysis tasks, from finding vesicles in noisy confocal images to identifying cells in 3D datasets, multi-parameter analysis of muscle fibres to immunological synapses. The power of the software lies in the easy access to a large range of professional image analysis and computer vision tools - with full control of all parameters - and in a dedicated architecture for large-scale batch processing (the largest dataset so far consisted of >30,000 images). It also contains tools for cell tracking, fuzzy logics and machine learning, which might be covered in the advanced course - this will depend on user demand. Please let me know if you are interested in attending either of the two training courses. And if you are not sure - if there is enough interest to learn more about the software, we could use the May FILM Club (31st of May) to give you an overview, based on projects in FILM. Good imaging, Martin PS: other improvements covered by the Equipment Sharing Grant are upgrades to our Widefield 2 microscope (64bit computer to deal with larger data files for live imaging, RGB camera for histological sections) and a new data processing server, which will allow processing of much larger datasets -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *Martin Spitaler, PhD* *FILM - Facility for Imaging by Light Microscopy* - Facility Manager - Sir Alexander Fleming Building, desk 401 Imperial College London / South Kensington Exhibition Road London SW7 2AZ UK Tel. +44-(0)20-759-42023 E-mail m.spitaler@imperial.ac.uk <mailto:m.spitaler@imperial.ac.uk> Website: http://imperial.ac.uk/imagingfacility