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). 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 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 Imaris 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 one's 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 External links www.bitplane.com www.andor.com www.mih.unibas.ch www.endeavourvision.com www.vetvir.uzh.ch/frame.html Microscopy Companies based in Zürich