Over 100 researchers from all over the world met online for the hugely successful 6th NorMIC Imaging Workshop, hosted by the University of Oslo.
The four-day workshop (25-28 May), designed for PhD students, postdocs and young PIs working within the life sciences, featured world-leading researchers who shared their expertise on a wide range of subjects, from image formation and AI-based processing to rendering and visualization.
Organized by Professor Oddmund Bakke, Department of Life Sciences, UiO, and Dr. Edna Xian Hu, of NCMM, the workshop saw huge demand from researchers, with over 90 participating daily in the morning lectures and over 70 taking part in each of the hands-on afternoon ‘lab’ sessions. Due to ongoing COVID-19 restrictions and, thanks to the support from the UiO’s IT department, UIST, the workshop was able to take place entirely online.
Teaching came in the form of inspiring talks, presentations, and hands-on lab sessions from the following international experts:
- Rainer Heintzmann, the co-inventor of Structured Illumination Microscopy (SIM) and Instant Structured Illumination Microscopy (iSIM). Rainer demonstrated the powerful free deconvolution software developed in his lab.
- Anna Klemm, an image processing scientist and well-known Cell Profiler instructor. Anne has trained many of the imaging specialists in Oslo. View some of her work here.
- Romain F. Laine, a researcher from the Ricardo Henriques group, the group that invented the SRRF (Super-Resolution Radial Fluctuations) stream. Read an interview with Romain here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lmcb/interview-romain-laine
- Stephen Cody, of Monash Micro Imaging. Stephen is famous for generating many powerful online teaching tutorials for microscopy and several auxiliary live imaging tools.
- Felix Margadant, a member of the Harald Stenmark group. Felix has devised several cellular force measurement tools. A software suite used in his UiO collaboration is https://imagej.net/PillarTracker
.* - PC Cheng, Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering, State University of New York in Buffalo, USA and famous plant biologist. Specialist in confocal microscopy, biomedical imaging, x-ray microscopy, microtomography, and lithography.
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Alongside the international speakers, a team of local experts were also actively involved in the teaching and organisation of the workshop, giving talks and sharing perspectives into their areas of research.
- Kay Schink, Project Leader at the Stenmark Group, Oslo University Hospital
- Rafael Camacho, an image processing scientist at the University of Gothenburg’s imaging platform
- Laura Rodriguez de la Ballina, a postdoc from the Simonsen Group, Oslo University Hospital
- Maria Àngeles Jimènez Sigstad, Head Engineer in Bioinformatics, Chemical Biology Platform NCMM & Department of Core Facilities, OUH
Describing the workshop and its organisation, Professor Oddmund Bakke, comments:
“This is the first time that we have organized such a complex online imaging workshop. Regular seminars are straightforward in these COVID times, but in this case, getting over 60 students to log onto to our servers and perform complex imaging processing tasks was a huge challenge. This would not have been possible without the excellent help from USIT, who did a formidable job on setting this up, acquiring enough server space, interacting with program suppliers and instructors and performing testing. A high number of online questions were answered continuously by all, contributing to ongoing interaction with the participants.
“In all, I think that, except the obvious lack of direct human contact and less networking between the participants, this format was a huge success. Some aspects were even better than our experience with previous physical workshops. The workload was, however, higher and I am very grateful to the speakers and instructors from around the world and to our local experts for their excellent contributions.”
Edna Xian Hu, Head Engineer at NCMM & co-organiser added: “We were lucky to have some great collaboration and teamwork from NCMM, IBV and USIT. Although we have run several workshops in the past, this was the first time that this workshop was hosted by NCMM and IBV, and the first time it was held purely online. We all gained very valuable experience of how to run such an event and we’re confident that will provide an event better workshop next time.
“Naturally, due to the feat of hosting such a workshop online, we did encounter some IT challenges. Fortunately, the team at USIT (Gard Thomassen and Sabry Razick), stepped in to support us. Together with Harold Gutch (NCMM/USIT), they were able to establish eight virtual machines on a server, along with all of the image processing software needed by our students to perform their hands-on experiments on.”
The workshop also provided the organisers with some crucial learning for next time, as Edna explains: “We realise now that the server is critical for the performance of the whole workshop, as it ensured a uniform performance of the practical sessions for every student's home computer. We have already collected post-workshop feedback from the students. We're pleased to have received an even more positive response to previous years, despite the increased number of students - previously we had 30 students participate - and the fact that the workshop took place entirely online."
The full list of teaching faculties and researchers involved during the workshop can be found via the event page: https://www.med.uio.no/ncmm/english/news-and-events/events/courses-and-workshops/2021/normic-imaging-workshop-course-in-advanced-light-m.html
About the NorMIC workshop series
The NorMIC series of workshops, initiated by support from Digital Life, Research Schools aims to teach biological researchers (PhD students, postdocs and young PIs) the principles of biological microscopes and image processing, and to educate them about the pros and cons of different types of microscopes and processing algorithms, alongside the potential artefacts that might come with using the technology. Many biologists that regularly use imaging don’t fully understand the basic principles of how the technology works. This can cause issues as, unlike other techniques such as a Western Blot, mistakes made in bioimaging are not immediately obvious to the untrained eye. Correctly processing generated images can also cause issues if the researcher has not been properly trained. The NorMIC series of workshops aims to fix these common mistakes and train researchers to correctly and successfully work with the technology.