Skip to content

biopb documentation

Open bioimage analysis, driven by your agent.

biopb lets you analyze microscopy images by talking to an AI agent — Claude Code, OpenCode, Cursor, or Hermes. You ask the agent to open an image or run an analysis, and it drives biopb for you: loading data, running segmentation and other algorithms, and showing results in a live napari viewer you can watch and tweak.

Get started How it fits together


What you can do

  • Open and browse large microscopy data — OME-Zarr, OME-TIFF, HDF5, CZI, LIF, ND2, and more — even datasets far larger than your computer's memory.
  • Do open-ended analysis in plain language. Filtering, measurements, region properties, spatial statistics — your agent writes the code and you watch results appear in napari.
  • Run trained models for segmentation and restoration (Cellpose, UNiFMIR, and others) without writing boilerplate.
  • Stay in control. Image results land in the viewer; numbers and tables go to the chat; you decide what to save.

Components

You only ever interact with your agent and the napari window. Everything else runs quietly underneath:

Piece What it does for you
Your AI agent The thing you talk to. It launches biopb and writes the analysis code.
Napari + Data Browser The viewer where images and results appear. Your agent drives it; you can edit by hand.
Data server Serves your image data, lazily, so huge files just work.
Algorithm servers Run the dedicated algorithms — usually on a GPU machine.

If you are just getting started, you don't need to think about the last two — the default install wires up a local data server automatically. See How biopb fits together when you want the full picture.

Where to next

These docs are for end users

Looking for protocol internals, contributor guides, or the gRPC/Arrow Flight specs? Those live in the source repositories on GitHub.