Eliceiri honored for imaging excellence

On April 16, 2024, Dean Ian Robertson held an event to recognize engineering faculty and staff for outstanding contributions. Kevin Eliceiri, the RRF Walter H. Helmerich Professor in biomedical engineering and medical physics, received the Byron Bird Award for Excellence in a Research Publication.

Authored between twenty-twelve and twenty-seventeen, five of Eliceiri’s papers have become seminal articles that have shaped field of image informatics. Drawing 95,000 citations among them, the papers emphasize open-source tools for image analysis—specifically, the “ImageJ” analysis ecosystem. Today, ImageJ is the most widely used open-source tool for scientific image analysis.

Eliceiri’s lab is the lead developer of ImageJ, which relies on reusing algorithms for many shared problems, rather than the more traditional computational engineering approach of designing an algorithm or software tool for a single problem. Among a broader suite of more than thirty papers, the five seminal articles describe contributions to the development of the tool, the different distributions and modules of ImageJ for specific scientific applications, and updates to the tool to meet modern imaging needs.