The Image Cytometry Standard (ICS) is a digital multidimensional image

file format A file format is a standard way that information is encoded for storage in a computer file. It specifies how bits are used to encode information in a digital storage medium. File formats may be either proprietary or free. Some file formats ...

used in

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microscopy Microscopy is the technical field of using microscopes to view objects and areas of objects that cannot be seen with the naked eye (objects that are not within the resolution range of the normal eye). There are three well-known branches of micr ...

. It stores not only the image data, but also the microscopic parameters describing the optics during the acquisition. ICS was first proposed in: P. Dean, L. Mascio, D. Ow, D. Sudar, J. Mullikin, ''Proposed standard for image cytometry data files'', Cytometry, n. 11, pp. 561-569, 199

The original ICS file format actually uses two separate files: a text header file with .ics extension and other, much bigger and with the actual image data, with .ids extension. This allows the compression of the data while leaving the header file accessible. On the other hand, the newer ICS2 file format uses only one single .ics file with both the header and the data together. The .ics in the two-file format is a text file with fields separated by tab character, tabs, and lines ending with a

newline Newline (frequently called line ending, end of line (EOL), next line (NEL) or line break) is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or a ...

character. In the newer ICS2 format this text header precedes the binary data. The ICS format is capable of storing: * multidimensional and multichannel data * images in 8, 16, 32 or 64 bit integer, 32 or 64 bit floating point and floating point complex data * all microscopic parameters directly relevant to the image formation * free-form comments

External links

* Sources for an ICS file reader/writer library released under the LGPL v2.1 license: https://github.com/svi-opensource/libics. Current version is 1.6.5 released August 18, 2021. * Python interface to libics
pylibics

for

ImageJ ImageJ is a Java-based image processing program developed at the National Institutes of Health and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation (LOCI, University of Wisconsin). Its first version, ImageJ 1.x, is developed in the publ ...

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Bio-Formats
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Fiji_(software) Fiji (''Fiji Is Just ImageJ'') is an open source image processing package based on ImageJ2. Fiji's main purpose is to provide a distribution of ImageJ2 with many bundled plugins. Fiji features an integrated updating system and aims to provide ...

. {{Graphics file formats Graphics file formats Metadata