Icy: A user-friendly environment for algorithm development and deployment

Bioimage informatics has emerged as a new interdisciplinary research endeavor for bringing the power of computational and mathematical sciences into the biological imaging arena. We describe an open-source software platform, Icy, that proposes a comprehensive framework for easy algorithm development and deployment fostering community-oriented efforts. Icy offers a platform to share and publish collaborative algorithm developments, while promoting re-usability and code sharing to ease the development of new algorithms, and simplifying user's feedback and support through a community web site.