BIA scope and submission to related resources

The BIA’s scope is bioimaging data at scales from molecules to organisms. It accepts data from any imaging modality including light microscopy, optical projection tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, ultrasound imaging, super-resolution microscopy, photoacoustic imaging, light-field microscopy, Brillouin microscopy, atomic force microscopy, and others. Many types of electron microscopy (EM) data should be submitted to EMPIAR - see below for further details.

Medical datasets that are linked to an identifiable individual and/or have a primary use in medical treatment are not in scope. Human cell lines and tissue arrays are in scope if they are not linked to an individual and do not have phenotypic data allowing for identification. In case of human image data where consent for publication is demonstrated, publication in the BioImage Archive will be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Submission to related resources

As part of its remit, the BioImage Archive works with added-value bioimaging data resources, providing storage infrastructure, data links between archives and shared deposition systems. Those added value resources provide domain specific expertise in data curation and presentation.

EMPIAR

EMPIAR, the Electron Microscopy Public Image Archive, is a public resource for raw, 2D electron microscopy images supporting 3D structure determination, as well as various types of volume EM data and soft X-ray tomography and X-ray microscopy. Currently supported data types for EMPIAR are:

Electron cryo-microscopy (EM)*, Electron cryo-tomography*, Scanning EM (FIB SEM, SBF SEM, array tomography), Soft X-ray tomography, X-ray microscopy

* For processed EM or cryo-tomography data, please go to EMDB.

IDR

The Image Data Resource (IDR) is a public repository of reference image datasets from published scientific studies. IDR datasets are interactively curated during the submission process. You can find more information about submission to IDR here.

IDR and the BIA overlap in the types of data they hold, and as such work together to coordinate submissions and ensure that data are shared between the resources, so that datasets in IDR are imported into the BIA. In the future, submission to the BioImage Archive will provide an option for starting parallel submission to the IDR.

Cross-modality BioImaging data

For studies generating data that cross modalities, different components of the study can be deposited in different resources and linked together. For an example of data deposition for correlative soft X-ray tomography and super-resolution structured illumination microscopy, you can read more here.