When the graduate students and postdocs in Martin Wilson's lab at the University of California, Davis, need to do image processing, they look to an unlikely source. Instead of off-the-shelf image analysis software, Wilson's team, which studies synapses in the retina, uses home-brewed algorithms running within the mathematical package Matlab, from The Mathworks, Inc., in Natick, Mass.
"Whenever we get images, we apply these routines that we've written to the images to massage the data, improve the signal-to-noise ratio, to do the things to get quantitative images that can tell us something interesting," says Wilson, a professor of neurobiology, physiology, and behavior.
They can do that, because Matlab isn't so much a program as it is a programming language, like Perl or C. The advantage of using such languages, says Kristen Amuzzini, biotech and pharmaceutical marketing manager at The Mathworks, is that programmers need not "reinvent the wheel" to implement ...
