We’re thrilled to share some highlights from our recent trip to a misty Milan for the Images 2 Knowledge conference! The conference was a fantastic opportunity to connect with passionate minds across the microscopy and data science communities and to see first-hand how work in image analysis is creating real interest and impact in the biological community.

Laura, Tom, Harriet and Max kicked off the event with excitement, especially knowing we had a workshop and live demo on deck! With some last-minute pull requests to tidy our outputs, we were prepared, if a bit nervous, to dive right into the capabilities of TopoStats. The workshop went off without a hitch and it was interesting to see the priorities of the wider image analysis community on using such a tool. There was particularly lively discussion about the participants loves, improvements, and future directions after seeing and using the tool for themselves, and how they would use the tool for their upcoming AFM data.

One of the most exciting moments was showcasing our AFMReader library (https://github.com/AFM-SPM/AFMReader/) in our workshop. We designed this to open-up the atomic force microscopy (AFM) community to use the tools developed by the wider microscopy image analysis world through Python. AFMReader provides essential tools for handling and analysing data specifically from AFM images, and it’s all built to be fully open and FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. We were blown away by the response! The attendees were excited about how AFMReader could help them build their own pipelines and open their data up to the wealth of image analysis tools already being used by other microscopies.

In addition to our workshop, Laura present a fantastic flash talk highlight all of the amazing work our team does using TopoStats, and Max presented a beautiful poster showcasing his work developing deep learning methods for TopoStats!