Support of a Biological Image Processing Center

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This award provides funds for the Image Processing Center at the University of New Mexico. A previous NSF award provided funds for the purchase of equipment that was used to set up the center. These funds will provide partial support of staff salaries. Additional support will be obtained from institutional funds and user fees. The facility serves a large and growing number of faculty who have need of image processing as part of their research programs. The center consists of three laboratories, one general purpose for the digital analysis of gels, photographs and other visual materials, one for quantitative fluorescence microscopy, and one for electron microscopy. Over the last twenty years, image processing has developed from a relatively crude and cumbersome technique suitable for only a few uses in astronomy, in the space program and in very sophisticated electron microscopy. Image processing is now a basic tool with significant impact on a variety of microscopic and other techniques in biology, biophysics, biochemistry and other areas of research. Despite their widespread acceptance, image processing techniques still demand relatively sophisticated understanding of computation to be of maximum benefit to their users. When coupled with the expense of the computational tools required, this means that image processing is often beyond the intellectual and financial means of investigators who might benefit from its use, but for whose research programs it is not absolutely essential. The existence of central facilities funded through a mixture of institutional funds, user fees and, where appropriate, direct grants provides a solution to this difficult situation. Though only a few years old, this facility is already well on the way to establishing itself as an important ingredient of numerous research programs at the University of New Mexico.