Pycro-Manager

Light microscopy remains an incredibly powerful and important method in neuroscience. The growing use of computational microscopy and machine learning methods in conjunction with light microscopy now demands adaptive imaging that requires data processing during acquisition to actively control the hardware settings of the microscope and additional instrumentation. µManager emerged as a powerful Java-based, open source software tool for microscope control over 15 years ago and has continued to grow in functionality since thanks to a large community of developers. However, recent years have seen the scientific community move towards the Python programming language with the majority of modern computer vision and scientific computing libraries being implemented in Python. Thus, to allow for greater Python integration of microscope control, Henry Pinkard and colleagues developed Pycro-Manager.

Pycro-Manager is a python package that enables control of micro-manager as well as development of customized experiments integrated with real-time image processing. Pycro-Manager integrates well with modern Python-based scientific computing libraries allowing for increased functionality. Pyrco-Manager is also well documented and their website has extensive tutorials and example notebooks for common applications. Thus, Pycro-manager is a powerful solution for modern microscope control, with increased functionality thanks to integration with modern Python libraries.

This research tool was created by your colleagues. Please acknowledge the Principal Investigator, cite the article in which the tool was described, and include an RRID in the Materials and Methods of your future publications.  RRID:SCR_022356