Customer testimonials
Dr. Zoltan Cseresnyes, (Confocal and 2-Photon Microscopy Core Facility - MCF - Max Delbrueck Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany):
Both my facility users and I are very impressed with the new (and not so new) features, and some of my new users are really enjoying the object analyzer and the ROI options!
(August 2011)
Dr. Pete Bankhead, (Bio Quant - Nikon Imaging Centre - Heidelberg, Germany):
As for comments, I would like to be clear that the more I use the HRM, the more I like it! I think it's excellent for general use, and the interface is very easy for new users to learn. So you should know that I am impressed by it, and I really appreciate your help in getting it working well for us. (July 2011)
Dr. Shantanu Sur, (Institute for Bio Nano Technology in Medicine, Northwestern University, Chicago, USA):
"We are also happy to renew the software agreement. Thanks for the warm support as always. We have got some nice images rendered by Huygens." (June 2011)
Dr. James Burchfield, (Molecular Imaging Facility, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, The University of New South Wales, Australia):
"The speed and fluidity of the program is outstanding. I am also very impressed by the output from the alignment tool." (June 2011)
MSc. Johannes Koch, (Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, MFPL, University of Vienna, Austria):
"I am convinced that not only the scientifically sound deconvolution and analysis software but also the excellent and personal support provided by Huygens will make Huygens the software of choice for scientific image processing." (October 2010)
Dr. Manuel Izquierdo Pastor, (CSIC-Universidad Autonoma de Madrid- Facultad de Medicina, Spain):
"Huygens features and the superb support you guys provide are important reasons why we bought Huygens. In addition, your on-line support encourages all-level users to face deconvolution and also helps a lot to avoid computer-artifacts, to double check achieved results, etc.." (September 2009)
MSc. Daniel Veilleux (École Polytechnique de Montréal, Québec Canada):
"Indeed, the numerous information provided by SVI was extremely useful in solving our issues with confocal imaging and deconvolution. We were able to identify a problem with the z-stepper of our microscope and bring about the required temporary modifications to correct for its deficiency while expecting a routine maintenance exercise to come. With these corrections and the default PSF, our images now have a relative error of less than 3-5% in the z-axis, compared to a previous deformation of 300-400%..."
"Thank you very much for the great help you've provided." (March 2009)
Dr. Jonathan Foley (Bio-engineering, University of California Berkeley, USA):
"We are running Huygens Core in a completely headless environment on our cluster. We have developed custom scripts that generate deconvolution jobs and then hand them off to the Sun Grid Engine scheduler. Its working out great. Our analysis pipeline is an order of magnitude faster now. We have Huygens Core running on 8 (Dual-Opteron 2Gb RAM) nodes. It takes 4 days to deconvolve 84 fields of 3 channel x 86 slices x1024x1024. Our datasets are pretty big because we are collecting statistics on a large number of cells. Previously, running Huygens Pro on a Mac Pro where we could only use one or two processors this took a month!!!" (January 2009)
Dr. Juraj Kabat (Biological Imaging Facility, NIH/NIAID, Bethesda, USA):
"We enjoy the new features/improvements in Huygens 3.3. This is the best release so far. Also twin slicer improvements are significant." (December 2008)
Dr. Michael Paddy (Section of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of California - Davis, USA):
"I thought you would be interested in this very dramatic difference when using the Huygens vs another decon package for noisy, live data. In theory, the Huygens should be better for noisy data like this because of the method it uses to generate the image updates in the decon iteration, but I was surprised to see just how much better it is." (2007)
Dr. James Evans (MIT CSBi, USA): "Because software companies generally respond to researchers' needs, most current imaging limitations occur downstream of acquisition", explains James G. Evans, research scientist at the Computational and Systems Biology Initiative (CSBi).
Evans and colleagues are developing an imaging pipeline to collect data directly from microscopes and shuttle this data at high speeds into a database for storage and management, where the data can then be sent for image restoration by deconvolution. To this end, Evans says he has had a lot of success with SVI's Huygens software. "It's very well parallelized, working across many processors, and is almost platform-independent," Evans says. (ref.: MIT CSBi).
Dr. Sergei Bushuk (Stepanov Institute of Physics, Minsk, Belarus):
"I'm 100% happy with the software. In fact, Huygens proved to be highly effective (and cost effective) solution. With correctly measured stacks the results are impressing."
Louis Villeneuve (Research Associate - Confocal Microscopy Heart Montreal Institute - Research Center, Canada):
"Thanks for the new version. I really like your product, Huygens Pro
is very complete and accurate."
Dr. Ray Gilbert (University of Auckland, Bio - Engineering Department, New Zealand):
"This is the software that we ended up purchasing, after trialling with two other packages. I found it to be the easiest to use of the 3 packages and their support was excellent (we had a few hiccups initially and they kept extending the free license for about 3 months while I tested everything I needed)."(Jan 2008)
Dr. Jakub Sikora (Charles University, 1rst Faculty of Medicine, Prague, Czech Republic):
"SVI is one of the least commercial commercial companies that I know." (March 2007)
Dr. Rolly Wiegand (Head CALM facility University of Edingburgh, UK):
"To make it short, we have very good experiences with the Huygens deconvolution software from SVI (no commercial interest here). The recent upgrade of the software gives you some convenient batching utilities. However, if you try Huygens Script in addition you will be able to write your own macros for batching and a lot of other applications. This might be a bit tricky at the beginning, but is worth the time spent. My recommendation is to run the software on sufficiently powerful workstations, preferably dual CPU machines with a minimum of 4GB of RAM. Just talk to the SVI guys and have a look at their website/knowledge base and try a test version on your own hardware." (Confocal list server, July 2006)
Dr. Andrew Resnick (Case Western Reserve University - Physiology and Biophysics, USA):
"The Huygens Deconvolution Software just makes the images look better. After deconvolution the images are cleaned up (the noise is removed, more details in the image). It is much easier to make a statement with deconvolved images."
Dr. Ulrike Engel (Scientific Director of the NIC Imaging Centre, Bioquant, University of Heidelberg, Germany):
"Researchers who use Huygens at the facility to enhance their confocal data are very much impressed by the results.
I would not have anticipated myself how much especially noisy confocal data can be improved by deconvolution with Huygens. As noisy data is the rule rather than the exception with live samples, we now use Huygens routinely to enhance our spinning disk data."
"At our Annual Fluorescence Microscopy Course Live Imaging in 3D course the short training in deconvolution with Huygens was very popular with students and had an addictive quality. Students came back the next day to deconvolve more image stacks. "
S. Kumar, G. Ho, K.M. Woo and L. Zhuo (Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, Singapore):
"Estimating the underlying fluorescence signal: Figure 1(a) is a typical image of the optic disc in the retina of a transgenic mouse where the fluorescence signal is from the GFP protein which, in this case, labels the glial cells. As observed, the image has a very low SNR and this makes it extremely difficult to detect any suitable landmark points and it is clearly inappropriate to use such images as reference images in rank matching. An a-priori estimate is therefore required to accurately estimate the underlying fluorescence signal. We have explored several methods of determining this estimate and found that the Huygens deconvolution method (Huygens Essential Software, Scientific Volume Imaging BV) gives the best results. The deconvolved result of Fig. 1(a) is shown in Fig. 1(b) and as observed, the speckle noise is removed and the fluorescence intensity profile is characterized by various intensity maxima. Conversely, a 9 × 9 median filtering method of estimating the a-priori estimate fails to remove the speckle noise and instead distorts the image as observed in Fig. 1(c). Figure 1(d) shows the results of applying anisotropic diffusion where the noise appears to be removed but at the expense of diffusing the underlying fluorescence signal resulting in the image appearing blurred overall." (Optics Express, Vol. 16, Issue 11, pp. )
).
Fig. 1. (a) Input image, of the GFP signal from the optic disc of the transgenic mouse. (b)–(d) restored image obtained after subjecting the input image to (b) Huygens deconvolution (c) 9 × 9 median filtering and (d) speckle reducing anisotropic diffusion.
References to SVI software
Quite some scientific papers mention SVI's Software. See a brief list in HuygensReferences.
Attendants to courses and trainings
SVI gives training sessions at our office at The Netherlands on a regular basis. We also give workshops and courses in conferences and institutions all over the world. (For more information see TrainingAndCourses). These are a few attendants' opinions about our courses:
After the workshops given at the ELMI 2007
:- Thank you for the excellent course that you had given. I had learned a lot about deconvolution.
After a two day course at the NIH, Bethesda, USA:
- ...we were very impressed by the presentations. He really managed to get us into what deconvolution can do for our images and to explain all the complicated
- ...able to explain physics concepts without using algorithms. This is rare. He gave a small philosophical introduction on reality and truth, which set the tone perfectly for his explanation of image restoration and deconvolution. It was very motivating to hear the explanations on the software.
- ...a very informative course!!!
After a Huygens Professional workshop at our office:
- ...the course has been great!!! I'm also much more confident with the Huygens Pro. The tcl command window is really powerful.
- Thank you again for the hospitality and the well organized course!!!
- The workshop gave insight into the manifold of possibilities provided by Huygens. I really enjoyed the final session, where we could discuss our individual problems and scientific question with the developers.
After a Huygens deconvolution workshop at our office:
- I enjoyed the course a lot and profited from it!!! The level of the audience was very high and we had a lot of stimulating discussions.
- Dr. Pawel Pasierbek (IMP-IMBA, Vienna):
This was a highly recommendable course with the aim to help us to optimize the usage of the SVI decon software. I would suggest to try the software beforehand in order to be able to use expertise of Hans, Jose and Edwin during the course. Bring your difficult data along with the results of your decon attempts, and discuss what can be done better.