A look back at the 7th Danish BioImaging Symposium

The 7th Danish BioImaging Symposium took place in Copenhagen on June 24th and 25th at the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences, UCPH. Organised by Danish BioImaging, the multi-sited and multimodal Euro-BioImaging Node for Denmark, the 2024 edition of the event gathered 150 participants to discuss innovative imaging techniques, groundbreaking advancements and the use of AI applications in clinical imaging. John Eriksson, Euro-BioImaging Director General, was invited to present to the Danish BioImaging Community the opportunities Euro-BioImaging can offer.

For Euro-BioImaging, national events like the Danish Bioimaging Symposium are special occasions to embrace the local imaging community's pulse. "This year again, we had a great variety in our audience," explains Sonia Diaz Garcia, the Danish Bioimaging Network and Danish Bioimaging-INFRA Coordinator and one of the event's organisers. "We attracted participants from the main Danish universities and hospitals, industry representatives, members from the Danish Cancer Institute, and visitors from neighbouring Sweden. The audience represented a fantastic mix of skills, topics, and interests." 

Image analysis and artificial intelligence were a highly discussed topic during this edition of the Danish Bioimaging Symposium. One example was the invited talk by Florian Jug from Human Technopole in Italy, “From Methods to Tools to Image Analysis as a Service: Our Experiences with Content-Aware Image Restoration and Semantic Unmixing of Microscopy”, which highlighted the possibilities of using artificial intelligence for the automated analysis of image data. Through concrete examples such as AI4life, a Horizon Europe project coordinated by Euro-BioImaging, Florian Jug stressed the importance of community-based efforts to effectively harness the powers of AI for data imaging analysis. Danish BioImaging, with its image analysis core facility, is actively contributing to this domain and enhancing the ability of the Danish research community to extract quantitative information from their bioimaging datasets. 

The Danish Bioimaging Symposium was the perfect setting for Euro-BioImaging to engage with local researchers and explain the wide range of opportunities the infrastructure offers them. "We were honoured to have the possibility to engage directly with the audience at the event,” said John Eriksson. “As a landmark research infrastructure and an ERIC, we draw all our inspiration from our vibrant community. In conjunction with our Nodes, we have much to give regarding projects, career opportunities, international collaborations and visibility," John Eriksson explained during his keynote presentation. "We amplify and reinforce the excellent work done by facilities and Nodes to give researchers the capacity to advance their work to the next level."

Euro-BioImaging is also a bridge and a booster for national imaging communities, helping them to reach their objectives. During his keynote, in a nod to Mads Rugaard Christensen, a representative from the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, John Eriksson alluded to Euro-BioImaging's role in connecting and coordinating national research communities all around Europe and beyond. "Fostering international collaborations is one of the greatest benefits provided by Euro-BioImaging to its members' national scientific communities," John Eriksson said. In its role as a Euro-BioImaging Node, the Danish BioImaging Network has been recently chosen to host the Molecules to Human Bootcamp on 16-27 September 2024. A major, strategic international imaging training course under the leadership of Global BioImaging, the Molecules to Human Bootcamp aims at bridging light microscopy and biomedical imaging communities and includes in the training of researchers from around the world to facilitate international collaboration and multimodal imaging approaches.

John Eriksson also highlighted Euro-BioImaging’s role in providing researchers and innovators with user access funding through Horizon Europe projects such as ISIDORe —to support research on infectious diseases and pandemic preparedness; canSERV —to fund user access to imaging services in cancer research with two challenge-based calls currently opened (one on "Reaching and Understanding of Cancer", deadline on 23 July 2024, one on "Revolutionising Cancer Patient Care​". deadline on 28 August 2024); AgroSERV —to fund user access to imaging services in agroecology with one current open call for transnational access and virtual access projects with a deadline on 30 September 2024. 

We want to thank our colleagues Sonia Garcia and Clara Prats for organising this excellent conference and for giving John Eriksson the opportunity to present and exchange with the community.