OpenCFU, a New Free and Open-Source Software to Count Cell Colonies and Other Circular Objects
This provides a practical tool for biologists to automate a tedious and error-prone task, though it is incremental as it builds on existing software concepts.
The authors tackled the problem of manually counting cell colonies and other circular objects, which is time-consuming and subjective, by developing OpenCFU, a free and open-source software that is robust, accurate, and fast for enumeration from digital pictures and video streams.
Counting circular objects such as cell colonies is an important source of information for biologists. Although this task is often time-consuming and subjective, it is still predominantly performed manually. The aim of the present work is to provide a new tool to enumerate circular objects from digital pictures and video streams. Here, I demonstrate that the created program, OpenCFU, is very robust, accurate and fast. In addition, it provides control over the processing parameters and is implemented in an in- tuitive and modern interface. OpenCFU is a cross-platform and open-source software freely available at http://opencfu.sourceforge.net.