Improving bone analysis software

Michael Doube, a researcher at the Royal Veterinary College, London, developed BoneJ, a plugin to ImageJ designed to model and measure the properties of bones and bone tissue, which allows researchers to compare bone structures amongst different species. While the software was initially distributed narrowly, BoneJ became highly popular and was cited in over 85 publications across veterinary medicine, human medicine and anthropology, and as a result Doube sought help from the SSI to further develop the tool so that it could be applied further.

BoneJ

SSI used a variety of different software to improve and extend BoneJ using Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and MediaWiki, which supplemented Doube's skills in programming. SSI conducted a user survey to gain further insight into how researchers had used the product and what improvements they wanted to make. Currently there is a research grant under consideration which would see a team of programmers improving the BoneJ further and widening access and usage. As such, SSI will potentially create a community of practice across many different disciplines.

• Doube, M., K?osowski, M.M., Arganda-Carreras, I., Cordelières, F.P., Dougherty, R.P., Jackson, J.S., Schmid, B., Hutchinson, J.R. and Shefelbine, S.J., 2010. BoneJ: free and extensible bone image analysis in ImageJ. Bone, 47(6), pp.1076-1079.

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