Bioimage informatics is a subfield of bioinformatics

Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is the application of computer science and information technology to the field of biology and medicine. Bioinformatics deals with algorithms, databases and information systems, web technologies, artificial intelligence and soft computing, information and computation theory, software...

 and computational biology

Computational biology

Computational biology involves the development and application of data-analytical and theoretical methods, mathematical modeling and computational simulation techniques to the study of biological, behavioral, and social systems...

. It is most related to using computational techniques to analyze bioimages, especially cellular and molecular images, at large scale and high throughput, with the goal to mine useful knowledge out of complicated and heterogeneous image and related metadata

Metadata

The term metadata is an ambiguous term which is used for two fundamentally different concepts . Although the expression "data about data" is often used, it does not apply to both in the same way. Structural metadata, the design and specification of data structures, cannot be about data, because at...

. There has been an increasing focus on developing novel image processing

Image processing

In electrical engineering and computer science, image processing is any form of signal processing for which the input is an image, such as a photograph or video frame; the output of image processing may be either an image or, a set of characteristics or parameters related to the image...

, data mining

Data mining

Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

, database and visualization techniques to extract, compare, search and manage the biological knowledge in these data-intensive problems.

This field is in quick growth in recent years, apparently due to the flood of complicated molecular and cellular microscopic images produced in a series of projects that create compelling challenges for the image computing community.