CBIA — Centre for Biomedical Image Analysis

The Centre for Biomedical Image Analysis (CBIA) is a well-established, interdisciplinary unit that conducts research, education and service activities related to automated image analysis, primarily applied in biology and medicine. It focuses on the development and benchmarking of algorithms for the analysis and synthesis of biomedical image data as well as on the use of computers to optimize and automate the biomedical image acquisition process.

CBIA carries out its research in close collaboration with experts in biology and medicine. With prevention, diagnostics and therapy in oncology as our main application areas, we aim to describe the spatiotemporal behavior of cancer cells and tumor tissues under various conditions. To this end, we develop reliable, ideally automated, detection, segmentation, classification, tracking and quantification algorithms, mostly by combining machine learning and traditional image analysis approaches. For benchmarking purposes, we focus on research on data and annotation quality, data augmentation techniques as well as metrics and ranking strategies for measuring algorithm performance.

CBIA coordinates the national Centre of AI in Oncology and closely collaborates with other relevant groups, mostly across Europe, within pan-European research infrastructure projects such as Euro-BioImaging (on the national level Czech-BioImaging) or TEF-Health. CBIA also co-organizes the Cell Tracking Challenge, which has established a widely recognized international benchmark for the objective comparison of cell segmentation and tracking algorithms (published in Nature Methods in 2017 and 2023).