Hierarchical Image Organization

This team will build on the existing napari-imc plugin and maintain the plugin. They will also extend the plugin to other, widely used hierarchical file formats such as HDF5 and zarr. This would enable the user to directly load hierarchical file formats without manual preprocessing (image extraction) in code, making it one of the only scientific image viewers with such functionality. In general, the napari-imc plugin can be seen as a prototype for representing hierarchical data structures and metadata-governed layer groupings in the user interface of napari. In the long term, this project envisions this functionality to be integrated into the core of napari through the extension of napari’s IO hook specification, enabling napari to visualize complex image formats popular in the bioimaging community.