Imaris 9.5 Release Notes

Welcome to the Imaris 9.5 release notes. Please have a look to the overview of Imaris Release notes for information about prior released features and fixed bugs.

Version Date: October 17, 2019

Native Distance Statistics for Surfaces and Spots

The Surfaces and Spots component of Imaris9.5 natively compute shortest distances to any other Surfaces or Spots. The computation is fast and capable of running on large images. It is now very easy to find the spots that are close to Surfaces by just adding a Spots filter for the ShortestDistanceToSurfaces statistics value.

The ShortestDistance Statistics makes several applications very simple:

• Color code Spots or Surfaces by Distance from Surfaces.
• Filter Spots inside or outside of Surfaces.
• Filter Spots in a specific distance band outside or inside Surfaces.
• Filter tracks of objects that “go inside” Surfaces.

The Spots have two new statistics:

• ShortestDistanceToSpots: computes the shortest distance from the center of each spot of “this” Spots to the centers of all spots from the other Spots.
• ShortestDistanceToSurfaces: computes the shortest distance from the center of each spot of “this” Spots to the border of all surfaces from the Surfaces. Distances are positive for spots outside of the Surfaces, and negative for spots inside of the Surfaces.

The Surfaces have two new statistics:

• ShortestDistanceToSpots: computes the shortest distance from the border of each surface of “this” Surfaces to the center of all spots from the Spots.
• ShortestDistanceToSurfaces: computes the shortest distance from the border of each surface of “this” Surfaces to the border of all surfaces from the other Surfaces. Distances are positive for surfaces that are entirely outside the other Surfaces. Distances are negative for surfaces that are entirely inside the other Surfaces. Distances are zero for surfaces that intersect the other Surfaces.

For performance reasons the Shortest Distance Statistics calculations can be turned on/off on a per object basis. To do so the creation wizards of Spots and Surfaces have a checkbox “Shortest Distance Calculation” on the first creation tab and on the edit tab (so that the setting can be changed after creation too). Note that shortest distances are calculated only between components that have the setting turned on, meaning that “Shortest Distance Calculation” must be turned on in at least two components to get such statistics. Note also that the first four Spots or Surfaces components created will have “Shortest Distance Calculation” set to “on” by default and further components are “off” by default.

Native Distance Statistics in Batch Processing

Shortest distance statistics between components produce an interdependence of components. As a consequence in Step 2 of Batch Setup where objects are created each object in the BatchPipeline has shortest distance statistics only to objects that are above the respective object in the list of objects. In the example below the “Spots 1” have “Shortest Distance to Surfaces 1” but not vica versa.

As another consequence of the interdependence of objects the following scenario can occur. Suppose you have set up the Spots in the above example to be filtered by Shortest Distance to Surfaces. If subsequently you rebuild the Surfaces component with different parameters the Spots component should be rebuilt too. Imaris warns you of this interdependence with a dialog as follows:

This dialog only pops up when it is necessary. If Spots1 had not been filtered by Shortest Distance to Surfaces then the interdependence would not exist and the warning upon rebuild of Surfaces would not appear.

Insightful Rendering of Surfaces

Imaris9.5 Surfaces have new rendering options.

All Surfaces are rendered with a “Material” that can be chosen from a list of “Material Preset”. Many of the new “Material Preset” choices have “bright edges” highlighting regions where the surface normal is perpendicular to the line of sight. Some of the “Material Preset” choices have some texture added to the surface. This texture is a rendering effect and does not come from the original image data. We hope that this is obvious to the user.

New Color Tabs

All surpass objects have a new color tab designed in alignment with the new Surfaces color tab. Some material choices are available only for Surfaces because only the Surfaces renderer has been implemented with this capability so far. The label color options on the color tab have been made a subsection of the base color mode. This allows better access to base color changes than in previous Imaris versions.

Visually Lossless Resolution Changes in Volume Rendering

Large data volume rendering uses a multi-resolution image to choose the optimal sufficient resolution for all the image intensities to be rendered to a pixel on the screen. In the rendering the volume is sub-divided into blocks and each block is sampled and rendered on slices that are orthogonal to the camera direction. In versions prior to Imaris9.4 the slices in each block were rendered in one of the discrete resolutions available in the pyramid. In Imaris9.5 each slice is rendered as a mixture of two resolution levels and this mixture changes with the distance from the camera. The two approaches are sketched in the following figure.

The effect of interpolating resolution on a slice by slice basis is that discrete switches of resolution when the image is rotated or zoomed become almost invisible.

High Performance Slice Rendering

The performance of Imaris’ slice renderers, OrthoSlicer, ObliqueSlicer, Extended Section View has been significantly improved for version 9.5.

WYSIWYG Animation

The Animation View user interface lets users configure the output video size and automatically adapts the render area to have the same aspect ratio as the output video size such that users see on screen a realistic preview of what will end up in the movie.

High Quality Video Output

Imaris9.5 produces higher quality h264 video than previous versions of Imaris.

Histogram Improvements

In the filter dialogs the sliders for min and max thresholds have been improved for ease of use and for reproducibility in batch processing. When a slider is dragged to the end of the histogram, i.e. the min slider to the left or the max slider to the right the respective threshold for the filter is automatically deactivated.

Updated ICS File Reader

The ICS reader has been updated to use version 1.6.4 of libics which is capable of reading ICS version 2.0 format.

ImarisXT supports Python3

The ImarisXT python interface now supports Python 3.7 in addition to Python 2.7.

MSD XTension

A new XTension “MSD Plot” on the XTensions tab of Spots and Surfaces creates a “Mean Squared Displacement Plot” from Tracks. This plot is useful to understand if the observed motion is consistent with Brownian motion or not.

Gallery View and Easy3D View Discontinued

The Gallery View and Easy3D View are no longer available in Imaris. We learnt from usage data analysis that both were not very popular and decided to let go of these in order to simplify the application.

Fixed Bugs