for the computer graphics term see bit plane . for the bureau of inverse technology see bit plane . bitplane type public founded 1992 headquarters belfast united kingdom key people luciano lucas product manager and head of sales products imaris software for 3d and 4d imaging parent andor technology slogan the image revolution starts here website www.bitplane.com bitplane is a provider of software for 3d and 4d image analysis for the life sciences . founded in december 1992 bitplane operates out of three offices in belfast united kingdom z rich switzerland and south windsor connecticut united states . contents 1 company history 2 market history 3 products 3.1 imaris 4 references 5 external links company history edit as confocal microscopes were first becoming commercially available the founders of bitplane marius messerli karl hermann fuchs and j rgen 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 at the eth 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 sgi workstations . in 2000 the company decided to replace the existing computer code with a completely new design based on c opengl and openinventor in order to focus on the windows operating system and gradually phase out the sgi hardware platform . the software now when supports 64 bit hardware and the macintosh operating system . currently when imaris performs optimally on graphics cards from nvidia and ati 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 . 1 bitplane was acquired by andor technology in december 2009 . 2 market history edit bitplane raised venture capital in 2000 to accelerate its growth . after an investment with endeavour 1 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 . citation needed 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 patented his microscope minsky 1957 3 . 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 4 and choudhury 1977 5 . 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 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 . products edit imaris edit imaris is bitplane s core product which provides functionality for the visualization segmentation and interpretation of 3d and 4d microscopy datasets . imaris allows visualization of original and derived data objects in a real time interactive manner so one can quickly make visual assessments of your experiments in 3d and 4d to discover relationships that are otherwise hidden . with a large variety of segmentation options imaris provides the user with tools to segment large datasets to identify separate and visualize individual objects . references edit http wl14www795.webland.ch andor technology latest news press releases and announcements the patent for minsky s microscopy apparatus was applied for in 1957 and subsequently granted us patent number 3 013 467 in 1961 . according to his published biography on the mit media lab webpage in 1956 when a junior fellow at harvard minsky invented and built the first confocal scanning microscope an optical instrument with unprecedented resolution and image quality brakenhoff confocal scanning light microscopy with high aperture immersion lenses journal of microscopy v 117 pp 219 232 nov 1979 cjr steppaerd a. choudhury optica acta 24 1051 1073 1977 external links edit www.bitplane.com www.andor.com www.mih.unibas.ch www.endeavourvision.com www.vetvir.uzh.ch frame.html v t e image processing software free software 3d slicer afni cellcognition cellprofiler dicomir endrov fiji fmrib software library freesurfer gemident gnu octave ilastik imagej itk ivt invesalius itk snap knime mango opencv osirix vigra vxl proprietary amira analyze aphelion bitplane idl mathematica matlab mipar mimics mountainsmap visage sdk retrieved from https en.wikipedia.org w index.php title bitplane & oldid 732723518 categories image processing softwaremicroscopycompanies based in belfasthidden categories vague or ambiguous time from january 2012all articles with unsourced statementsarticles with unsourced statements from october 2011 navigation menu personal tools not logged intalkcontributionscreate accountlog in namespaces article talk variants views read edit view history more search navigation main pagecontentsfeatured contentcurrent eventsrandom articledonate to wikipediawikipedia store interaction helpabout wikipediacommunity portalrecent changescontact page tools what links 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