Columbus™ is a convenient and easy-to-use solution for high volume data management, storage, retrieval, visualization and protection of images and analyzed results.  Designed as a complementary product for the Opera™ platform, Columbus can import, export and manage image formats from a wide variety of sources, providing a central repository and solution for all your microscope imaging requirements.

Columbus data management and analysis software is available in two versions;

• Columbus Gallery, which provides a comprehensive data archive, management and visualization solution and
• Columbus Conductor, that includes all the functionality of Columbus Gallery, plus the ability to analyze or re-analyze HCS data from the Opera or other image data using Acapella™ image analysis software.

Columbus is ideally placed to become the industry standard for image data management.  The system utilizes the OMERO server, developed by the Open Microscopy Environment (OME).

Based on an open protocol, Columbus is able to operate with a wide variety of instruments and software so that you can place the system at the center of your volume storage requirements.

Columbus Gallery allows complex HCS multi-channel images to be stored and accessed by multiple users from their own workstation to view and explore with personal defined security settings, such as read/write/delete privileges for their own data and that of other users.

The well-centric database architecture of Columbus allows the user to browse images using relational information such as well position, Z slice and time point for kinetic experiments. In contrast to many HCS data management systems, the metadata detailing how the images were acquired, which algorithm and input parameters were used to analyze the images, the output parameters and numerical results are all stored with the image data. This means that the complete history of the experiment can be reviewed when examining the image data, so that a better understanding of the results can be obtained.

Columbus Conductor takes your data management system to a new level, by combining Acapella image analysis software with the Columbus Gallery functionality.  Image data can be analyzed or re-analyzed using Acapella running on the server computer, which means that you can take advantage of the greater power to run batch processes and obtain much quicker results.