Education in biomedical informatics: Learning by doing bioimage archiving

For a common user, bioimages seem to be very easy to treat, to read, to understand and, therefore, to archive. Conversely, bioimage archiving require a very complex design and implementation process that needs skilled and trained technicians. We proposed to a class of bioengineering students at the Politecnico University of Milan the implementation of a hand image repository specifically designed for highlighting the main features that should be taken into account when treating bioimage archives. Students were required to build the archive with software tools they had previously learned in other programming language courses and available at the university informatics class-rooms.