In Spring, Glencoe Software announced a new offering of OMERO Plus Hosted, a fully managed service designed to simplify image data management for research organizations of any size. Now, powered by Portal, OMERO Plus Hosted provides a robust orchestration platform for scalable, end-to-end image-based assays.
Why Hosted?
OMERO Plus provides a comprehensive platform for storage, management and access to image datasets, coupled with the professional support and warranty required for enterprise-level deployments.
OMERO Plus Hosted enables the cutting edge capabilities of OMERO Plus without the need for on-premises infrastructure or dedicated IT resources. Glencoe’s expert team manages the hosting, deployment, scaling, monitoring and maintenance of the image data management systems. By applying IaC principles, OMERO Plus Hosted significantly reduces the time required to implement and maintain a robust image data management system at a global scale.
Powered by Portal
With the new features for automation of data warehousing and analysis presented here, OMERO Plus Hosted becomes an orchestration platform of choice for end-to-end and scalable image-based assays at the world’s largest organizations.
Configurable data warehousing
Portal includes a robust orchestration platform that bridges the gap between traditional image file formats on local storage and modern cloud-native workflows. Whether you’re working with high-content screening data, digital pathology images, or large-scale microscopy datasets, Portal simplifies the process of centralizing your data in the cloud.
Portal ensures a smooth and efficient import process into OMERO Plus, including registration of key experimental or clinical metadata and optional conversion of image files to cloud-native format OME-Zarr to future-proof your data and take full advantage of lower cost storage options in the cloud, including object storage.
Portal’s automation reduces manual effort, minimizes errors, and accelerates workflows. Whether importing a single dataset or managing terabytes of image data, Portal scales using the built-in elasticity of cloud resources.
Analyze data your way, at scale
Portal lets users launch image analysis jobs directly within OMERO Plus Hosted, right from the web browser. With modular support for the most popular tools in Digital Pathology and High Content Screening, you decide how your images are analyzed.
Glencoe has worked closely with customers to integrate both open-source and commercial platforms commonly used in the bioimaging community. Rather than reinventing analysis, Portal provides the interface layer that enables scalable execution from the browser.
Portal supports popular AI-based segmentation tools and is extendable with your custom AI models. Per-object intensity, morphometric, and spatial features are calculated automatically and stored alongside the original images, ready for visualization and mining in OMERO Plus interfaces like PathViewer and Pageant.
All analysis results are stored in AWS S3, offering both scalability and long term cost efficiency for downstream workflows.
Monitor complex workflows for traceability and reproducibility
The imaging data lifecycle is complex. Portal manages not only each dataset, but also the entire path that data has taken, from registration through analysis. Every import, conversion, or analysis task is tracked and displayed with its current status and results.
Generating locally managed analysis outputs (CSVs, PDFs, etc.) via unversioned custom code is not reproducible and hinders creation of data science products within your organization. Through Portal’s web interface, all analysis inputs, settings, and outputs are organized and versioned within OMERO Plus. Researchers can reproduce past analyses, compare parameters, and relaunch jobs with new data, directly from the web interface.
This transforms what was once a collocation of ad-hoc scripts and files into a transparent, auditable, and reproducible workflow.
Interfaces for data mining and analysis
Glencoe Software provides the interfaces to visualize and mine object-level results produced from Portal, all from the web browser. Read more about these interfaces here.
Interested in a custom solution? All data produced by Portal and managed within OMERO Plus Hosted is accessible via our open API. Tools like omero2pandas enable access to the full suite of Python data science and machine learning packages when working with OMERO data. OMERO Plus is therefore the data engine of choice for data analytics and AI in bioimaging.
What’s next?
Interested in OMERO Plus Hosted? Reach out to Glencoe Software to learn more about this option and other OMERO Plus offerings.
Stay tuned to learn more about how Glencoe’s management of the cloud resources behind OMERO Plus Hosted can save your organization on storage costs.