Visiting the Euro-BioImaging Spanish Nodes

With summer came the season of conferences and workshops, taking the Euro-BioImaging Hub team across Europe. Head of Image Data Services, Aastha Mathur, took advantage of the AI4Life workshop in Madrid in June to visit facilities that are part of our new Spanish Nodes. In this article, she shares memories from her brief tour of Spain and introduces us to some of the exciting Spanish facilities that are now part of the Euro-BioImaging Node community.  

Text by Aastha Mathur

Destination: Valencia

For my first visit, I was warmly welcomed by Prof. Luis Marti Bonmati, Pedro Mallol and their fantastic team at the Hospital La Fe, part of the Euro-BioImaging Population Imaging Valencia Node. Situated in the Hospital La Fe campus, the team works closely and collaboratively with clinicians next door, across Valencia, and across Europe. The team has great expertise in using clinical data for research purposes and developing robust and secure, enabling infrastructure to carry out such research. First I got insights into the data management interface between the clinical and research environments along with strategies of data and metadata handling, followed by a glimpse into some of their ongoing projects, covering topics such as supporting data curation, data quality enrichment, or using AI methods for image analysis. The highlight of the visit was indeed the nice discussions with the team members, and a tour of the facility with world class instrumentation. I found the visit to be a great learning experience. 

Visiting Barcelona

The next stop on my visit was Barcelona, where in an action packed day, I managed to visit 3 different facilities, all thanks to my kind hosts. We started with a visit to the Imaging facility at the University of Barcelona, where the head of the facility, Maria Calvo showed us her specialised instruments for in-vivo, live cell imaging. This included the top-notch high throughput screening microscope, fitted with a robotic arm for automated plate exchange, which most certainly produced large volumes of valuable image data. We even managed to catch the delivery of their new microscope in progress, but I guess we will only see it in action during our next visit. 

Then we made our way to Castelldefels to visit the imaging facility at ICFO (SNL). This centre situated at the institute of photonics interfaces research in biology and physics. Here, the head of the facility, Pablo Loza, together with Gustavo Castro from his team showed us around the many specialised, homebuilt as well as commercial instruments they have. Their multiview lightsheet microscopes were seamlessly connected to the local HPC facility providing data management service. The team also gave high importance to use of metadata standards during data acquisition and storage. Their research topics are varied and range from mild imaging to detect retinopathies in the human eye, to analysing starch content of the famed paella rice. Indeed, we learnt that with application of imaging technologies, the sky's the limit. 

Meeting with colleagues at the Bilbao Node

After having the opportunity to catch up with the Bilbao Advanced Light Microscopy Node (ALM@BIO) site in an online meeting and discussion, we headed back to Barcelona for my final stop at the imaging facility at the IRB.

Great open source lightsheet microscope at IRB 

Julien Colombelli, who is the Head of the imaging facility at IRB introduced me to their Open source hardware Lego-based lightsheet microscope, LEMOLISH. The facility very well combines commercial setups with different homebuilt setups to cater to the needs of their users. Combined with data management and image analysis workflows, they offer complete end-to-end imaging solutions. I ended the evening with a great discussion, with Julien and Chong Zhang from his team, about FAIR image data and analysis tools and useful community resources that enable it.

I was very impressed by the fantastic services provided by our facilities, and thankful for this great opportunity to visit our Nodes and get a chance to get to know our colleagues in Spain. Hasta luego!