Bitplane
Encyclopedia
- This article is about the software company. For the computer graphics term, see bit planeBIT planeThis article is about Natalie Jeremijenko and the Bureau of Inverse Technology's project. For the company, see Bitplane. For the digital information term, see bit plane....
. For the Bureau of Inverse Technology, see BIT planeBIT planeThis article is about Natalie Jeremijenko and the Bureau of Inverse Technology's project. For the company, see Bitplane. For the digital information term, see bit plane....
.
Bitplane is a provider of software for 3D and 4D image analysis
Image analysis
Image analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques...
for the life sciences
Life sciences
The life sciences comprise the fields of science that involve the scientific study of living organisms, like plants, animals, and human beings. While biology remains the centerpiece of the life sciences, technological advances in molecular biology and biotechnology have led to a burgeoning of...
. Founded in December 1992, Bitplane operates out of two offices in Zürich
Zürich
Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...
, Switzerland
Switzerland
Switzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
and one in South Windor, CT, USA.
Company history
As confocal microscopes were first becoming commercially available, the founders of Bitplane, Marius Messerli, Karl-Hermann Fuchs, and Jürgen Holm, realised that there was no suitable way to visualize and analyze the improved images provided by this more modern equipment. While pursuing their research at the Institute for cell Biology a the ETHEth
Eth is a letter used in Old English, Icelandic, Faroese , and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh and later d. The capital eth resembles a D with a line through the vertical stroke...
in Zurich the first productive version of Bitplane's core product, Imaris, was developed. A small community of users developed among the scientific collaborators of the founders and the company Bitplane was created.
The name Imaris has been derived from three words: "image" analysis, the primary function of the software, "Marius" the name of the innovator and Bitplane co-founder, and finally, the "Personal Iris", the name of the hardware that initially enabled interactive 3D imaging.
When Imaris was initially introduced to the market in 1993, only the most advanced hardware platform was able to accomplish the operations at a speed worthy of being deemed "interactive". From 1993 through 2000, the software ran exclusively on Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
(SGI) workstations.
In 2000, the company decided to replace the existing computer code with a completely new design based on C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
, OpenGL
OpenGL
OpenGL is a standard specification defining a cross-language, cross-platform API for writing applications that produce 2D and 3D computer graphics. The interface consists of over 250 different function calls which can be used to draw complex three-dimensional scenes from simple primitives. OpenGL...
and OpenInventor, in order to focus on the Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
operating system and gradually phase out the SGI hardware platform. The software now supports 64-bit hardware and the Macintosh operating system. Currently, Imaris performs optimally on graphics cards from NVIDIA
NVIDIA
Nvidia is an American global technology company based in Santa Clara, California. Nvidia is best known for its graphics processors . Nvidia and chief rival AMD Graphics Techonologies have dominated the high performance GPU market, pushing other manufacturers to smaller, niche roles...
and ATI
Ati
As a word, Ati may refer to:* Ati, a town in Chad* Ati, a Negrito ethnic group in the Philippines* Ati-Atihan Festival, an annual celebration held in the Philippines* Ati, a queen of the fabled Land of Punt in Africa...
, which provide the speed and ability to handle large amounts of data needed for modern 3D visualization.
By the end of 1994, the software had sold in 30 labs in central Europe. In 1998, the product was introduced to the US market.
From 1994 to 1997, in co-operation with the Maurice E. Muller foundation in Bern, Switzerland, Bitplane launched a second line of software products for the documentation and management of medical information for orthopedic surgeons. In 1997, this part of Bitplane's activity was made independent. Headed by Dr. Holm, this software line operates under the name of Qualidoc AG, Switzerland, and is a vendor of hospital information management systems .
Bitplane was acquired by Andor Technology
Andor Technology
Andor Technology PLC is a developer and manufacturer of high performance light measuring solutions .Andor Technology was set up by its founders, Dr. Hugh Cormican, Dr. Donal Denvir and Mr. Mike Pringle in the mid 1980s...
in December 2009 .
Market history
Bitplane raised venture capital in 2000 to accelerate its growth. After an investment with Endeavour (http://www.endeavourvision.com), Bitplane started to grow its presence in North America and built a new technology foundation for the software.After having weathered a slowing in demand caused by the burst of the internet bubble in 2001, Bitplane steadily grew in sales, market share, and profitability.
The development of Imaris is tightly linked to the development of the confocal microscope. The first publication of a confocal microscope appeared in 1957 when Marvin Minsky
Marvin Minsky
Marvin Lee Minsky is an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy.-Biography:...
patented his microscope (Minsky 1957 ). The instrument did not find much attention in the scientific community at the time due to the lack of light collection efficiency. It was only at the end of the 1970s, with the generation of scanning confocal microscopes, that the technique became useful for biological studies (Brakenhoff, 1979 and Choudhury 1977 ).
In order to explore the 3D capabilities of the confocal microscope, the instrument still had to be combined with high-end graphics computers. The first combination of a confocal microscope with specialized computer hardware that enabled digital image processing was presented by Van der Voort et al. (1985). In the late 1980s, Biorad introduced the first commercial laser scanning confocal microscope to the market, followed by Carl Zeiss and Leica
Leica Microsystems
Leica Microsystems GmbH is a leading global manufacturer of optical microscopes, equipment for the preparation of microscopic specimens and related products. There are ten plants in eight countries with distribution partners in over 100 countries...
soon after. All of these instruments delivered quality 3D images however, there was no software to properly visualize and analyze the content. The development of Imaris started in 1989, to fulfill the needs of biologists to take full advantage of these high quality images.