“…Semiautomatic and completely automated image processing methods have been shown to be useful in biological science and medicine~Gatlin et al, 1993;Nelson et al, 2000;Swedlow et al, 2003!. For example, the automation of chromosome aberration scoring has reduced the burden of routine chromosome analysis for clinical diagnostics, thus allowing for unambiguous data acquisition and increased sample throughput~Coco-Martin et al, 1998!. For radiological studies, automated processing has been particularly useful in assisting in the viewing and interpretation of digital radiographs, such as magnetic resonance images of the brain and radiograph images of the chest and extremities~Huh et al, 2002;Koenker & Grover, 2002!. Digital imaging and processing has also created a driving interest in the use of microscopy for large-scale screening using informatics for the storage and analysis of microscope image data. For example, stored data sets of small molecules such as gene sequences along with related digital image recordings can be accessed in open databases, thereby bridging the gap between sequence and function~Mayer et al, 1999; Gonczy et al, 2000!.…”