A new era in bioimage informatics.

Bioimage informatics arose from efforts to automate pathology and cytology tasks (Eaves, 1967). With few exceptions, much of the software developed during these early days, whether in academic or commercial institutions, was proprietary. The primary paradigm was production of hand-tuned engineered systems that could reproduce human performance, and visualization was emphasized for interpreting results or providing assistance to clinicians (Bartels and Wied, 1977; Kaman, et al., 1984; van Driel-Kulker and Ploem, 1982). The computational resources available at the time were frequently limiting. Essentially, no successful commercial systems came from these efforts for many years, until the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of automated Pap smear analysis in the mid 1990s (Patten et al., 1996).