About IBIA:
Imaging biological entities is essential to explore and understand the nature of complexity present in living organisms. In modern era, the images play a vital role in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, identification of cellular processes, estimation of crop yields, identification of pests, nutritional deficiencies in plants, etc. Thus, it is imperative to systematically capture, store and analyze these images on digital platforms.
The actual utility of biological resources depends on the consideration and implementation of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and, Reusability (FAIR) principles, during their development. However, the common standards are not available to accept all types of imaging modalities data. The progress is being made to achieve this goal. Some community suggested guidelines such as Recommended Metadata for Biological Images (REMBI) and standards are becoming available to standardize rules for the collection of biological images and associated metadata. Motivated by the community efforts and considering their importance, we have developed an online Indian Biological Images Archive (IBIA) to collect the all types biological images covering various life science domains including but not limited to the plants, animals, birds, marine organisms, etc.
The some example imaging modalities to be covered through IBIA are visible light photography, histopathology, digital X-ray, microscopy, CT, PET, ultrasound, MRI, CryoEM, ECHO, ECG, EEG, Mammography, Endoscopy, Multispectral images, etc. Initially, we have successfully tested the IBIA by uploading publicly available histopathology images and 10 major basmati paddy seed varieties images dataset. Thus, IBIA will be a comprehensive resource to manage biological images and associated metadata in a systematic manner through five well-defined sections namely, Project, Study, Sample, Experiment, and Run Upload. The portal is dynamic in nature, allow the users to add new metadata fields (if not already present on the archive) to make IBIA more comprehensive and, thus, to enable for capturing the maximum information available at the submitter’s end. In future, we have plans to integrate open-source image visualizer tools with the portal and more user-friendly data upload and search interfaces. In the coming years, IBIA will keep on evolving to act as a single stop platform, to provide all types of biological images data to research biologists, imaging scientists (technology developers) and computer vision researchers.
