Reconstruction of laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) spatial distribution images in Microsoft Excel 2007

•Excel Laser Ablation Imaging (ELAI) allows to establish element distribution maps.•The software uses Microsoft Excel 2007 with the aid of VBA.•This open software offers free customisable semi-manual image generation.•The adapting to special requirements is very easy.•Prepared images can be transferred to common image formats (e.g. TIFF, JPG).

The spatial distribution of metals in biological tissue is an important field in biomedical research. Based on the fundamental significance of metals in health, many metal imaging analysis methods were developed during the last decades. Metal and non-metal imaging by laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) is an effective mean to obtain data in high spatial resolution and sensitivity. Unfortunately, the visualization of metal measurements normally needs special software solutions. This work reports the development of a new software tool allowing the reconstruction of metal distribution maps using Microsoft Excel 2007 with the aid of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) user-defined functions. This routine uses continuous lists of measured data points as raw input. A key step is the determination of the correct length of measurement lines to constitute images without shearing. Adaption to special requirements is easy. It permits the fast generation of high quality scaled images from Microsoft Excel. Moreover, the visualization tool is simply transferable to other systems and can export the images in common image formats such as TIFF or JPG which then can be read out by established image treatment and region of interest handling software such as Image J.

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