The imaging tsunami: Computational opportunities and challenges

Microscopy has fueled biological discoveries for centuries, but technical progress during the last decades has greatly expanded the type and quantity of biological information that can be revealed by imaging. Advances in instrumentation, labeling and computation are driving an imaging data tsunami on par with that of DNA sequencing. We illustrate this trend on five data intensive microscopy techniques and discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that massive imaging data raise for our understanding of biological systems.