Scott Pomeroy oversees the Imaging Core at Children's. He was looking for a better way to manage the increasing amount of image data generated in research studies run by Children's investigators. The old system was running out of disk space, investigators took their data away on DVD, and requests for retrieval of data acquired months previously took up a substantial portion of the facility manager's time.

Children's was already using Catalyzer's lab notebook application in several labs, so it was natural to look at its image-management capabilities. Axiope teamed with Apple Computer to optimise the application for the XServe/XRaid data storage platform. After an evaluation, Children's adopted the solution.

"We're using the Catalyzer image-management solution on Apple's data storage hardware to manage all the image data coming off our microscopy core-facility machines," says Dr. Pomeroy. "Now we know all the data is being securely archived and backed up, our investigators have access to their date from any networked computer, and best of all, they can search the images themselves rather than having to make requests of the facility manager, which is what they used to have to do."

The imaging core facility has several microscopes of varying sophistication and uses Metamorph software for image analysis. The archive grows at a rate of about 2 gigabytes per day and is expected to reach one terabyte in the coming year.

One of the most common requests from researchers used to be for assistance in finding an image from an experiment conducted several months previously. The archive was organized by date and by researcher, to assist with this task, but the researcher often didn't know the exact date of the experiment, so many files had to be opened and inspected to find the right one. Such requests usually came from hurried researchers who needed the image immediately for a publication deadline. Interviewing the researcher and conducting the search was a time consuming process, so it was increasingly difficult to provide this service for all core facility users.

In the new workflow, as an investigator acquires images Catalyzer automatically catalogs them and uploads the images and catalogs to the server, running on an Apple XServer box which manages XRaid disk arrays. Images and catalogs are immediately available across the network at the investigator's desktop. The cataloging process extracts all the metatdata from the images - the microscope settings, the user details, data and time of acquisition, and any notes typed in at the microscope - and generates a thumbnail of the image. Investigators can download the catalogs and images to the desktop where, using the Catalyzer client, they can add additional information to the catalogs and link in other data (e.g. behavioural data spreadsheets, sequencing data). Catalogs can then be reuploaded to the server for security and, if desired, sharing with others. Powerful search using field names and values is available on the server and the desktop. Thumbnails allow search to proceed without the need for format specific software (e.g., Zeiss's LSM viewer).

Because of Catalyzer's Active Directory integration facilities, CHB users can log in to the server using their standard username and password. The server administrator establishes their initial access permissions. Users can themselves then create folders and catalogs on the server and assign access rights to groups, individuals, all other licensed users, and non-licensed users.

"Without Catalyzer, I'd have to go back to the old way of looking at folder names and dates and try to guess from what the user could remember about their experiment six months ago, " says Matt Salanga, who manages the imaging core facility at Children's. Now investigators do their own searches for their images on the server, leaving Matt free to concentrate on his core activities supporting researchers in conducting imaging experiments.