OpenCFU, a New Free and Open-Source Software to Count Cell Colonies and Other Circular Objects

TL;DR

OpenCFU is a free, open-source software tool designed to automatically count circular objects like cell colonies from images and videos, offering robustness, accuracy, speed, and user-friendly control over processing parameters.

Contribution

This work introduces OpenCFU, a novel software that automates counting of circular objects, improving speed and accuracy over manual methods with an intuitive interface.

Findings

OpenCFU is robust and accurate in counting circular objects.

The software is fast and provides user control over parameters.

OpenCFU is cross-platform and freely available.

Abstract

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.