![]() ![]() TO THE LETTER: R AND S If is any indication, most biologists in need of advanced mathematics take the no-cost route. Though intended for a broader audience than life scientists, these packages nevertheless are powerful applications and languages with a significant presence in the academic, biotech, and pharmaceutical communities. Matlab is just one of a number of math-centric languages, both open source and commercial, that researchers can use to write customized, mathematically intensive applications for their lab everything from filtering noise from experimental time series data to running systems biology models. "In other languages it might be 30 or 50 lines of code." ![]() "In Matlab that's one line of code," says Amuzzini. Take k-means clustering, for instance, which is an algorithm used to cluster microarray data. The advantage of using such languages, says Kristen Amuzzini, biotech and pharmaceutical marketing manager at The Mathworks, is that programmers need not "reinvent the wheel" to implement algorithms that have already been developed. ![]() They can do that, because Matlab isn't so much a program as it is a programming language, like Perl or C. "Whenever we get images, we apply these routines that we've written to the images to massage the data, improve the signal-to-noise ratio, to do the things to get quantitative images that can tell us something interesting," says Wilson, a professor of neurobiology, physiology, and behavior. Instead of off-the-shelf image analysis software, Wilson's team, which studies synapses in the retina, uses home-brewed algorithms running within the mathematical package Matlab, from The Mathworks, Inc., in Natick, Mass. When the graduate students and postdocs in Martin Wilson's lab at the University of California, Davis, need to do image processing, they look to an unlikely source. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |