Published: 22 Jul 2015 | Last Updated: 23 Jul 2015 09:53:52

Dr Michael Doube has been awarded a grant by the Wellcome Trust called: "BoneJ2 - Full-featured next-generation BoneJ for standardised bone image analysis"

BoneJ is a free software resource for bone image analysis created by Michael Doube as an ImageJ plugin in the Java programming language. It is used by 100-200 groups worldwide monthly and cited 1-2 times weekly.

BoneJ was initially released in 2010 to provide a specialised, easy to install and user-friendly software resource for bone scientists. BoneJ has markedly outperformed these early aims, which has created a burden of software maintenance and community management, but making obvious a number of avenues for increasing its value as a biomedical resource.

The technology underlying ImageJ is changing ("ImageJ2"), presenting substantial opportunities for new and enhanced functionality due to ImageJ2's breakthrough n-dimensional image model, region of interest handling, and streamlined plugin distribution infrastructure.

This Wellcome Trust-funded project will provide BoneJ2 as a robust, free and open source software resource to the bone research community, and will offer much enhanced technical and documentation infrastructure to users and developers, enabling long-term resource provision. BoneJ2 will incorporate user-driven improvements, and expand its functionality with histomorphometry capability employing ImageJ2's new technology. BoneJ2's modules will be thoroughly tested and validated, and easily reused forming resources for other research domains, e.g. soil, plant and food science, connecting environment, nutrition and health.