Euro-BioImaging Research Navigator — AI for Access

Finding the right microscope — or the right facility — shouldn’t require knowing the map of European imaging infrastructure by heart. The Euro-BioImaging Research Navigator is an AI-powered assistant for the Euro-BioImaging Access Portal that answers plain-language research questions like “Which nodes offer MINFLUX in Europe?” or “I need cryo-EM for structural biology — where can I go?” and returns grounded, ranked recommendations.

Built as part of the EU-funded “AI for Access” project, the Navigator uses a retrieval-first architecture: the language model generates focused search queries, a deterministic BM25 lookup retrieves real records from the facility database, and an agent synthesizes the answer — so recommendations stay grounded in actual data, with honest fallback when something isn’t in the database. It supports streaming responses, visible reasoning steps, multi-turn conversation and interactive clarification.

The Navigator is live at navigator.bioimage.io, deployed on Kubernetes on the KTH cluster, with frontend integration into the Euro-BioImaging Access Portal underway. It continues the lab’s work — alongside AI4Life and the BioImage Model Zoo — on making bioimaging infrastructure open, findable and AI-accessible.