Euro-BioImaging Research Navigator — AI for Access

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

BioImage.IO Chatbot — Your AI Assistant for Bioimage Analysis

Tue, 20 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Bioimaging is evolving fast, with an ever-growing landscape of tools, data formats and workflows. For many researchers — especially those without extensive programming experience — navigating it is daunting. The BioImage.IO Chatbot bridges that gap: an AI-powered assistant, built on a knowledge base contributed by the global bioimaging community, that answers complex questions, points to the right tools and databases, and can autonomously carry out analysis tasks on demand.

Under the hood it pairs large language models with a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system over community-curated documentation, and a set of specialized AI agents tuned for different needs — general information, education, and hands-on bioimage analysis. Leveraging modern code-generation, tool-calling and vision capabilities, it solves bioimaging tasks with increasing autonomy and accuracy, and can be embedded into third-party websites or extended through ImJoy and Hypha.

The work was published in Nature Methods (2024, Focus on advanced AI in biology; free access) by Wanlu Lei, Caterina Fuster-Barceló, Gabriel Reder, Arrate Muñoz-Barrutia and Wei Ouyang — a collaboration between the AICell Lab (KTH), KTH’s Department of Intelligent Systems, Ericsson, and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Try the BioImage.IO Chatbot →

RAG | AICell Lab

Euro-BioImaging Research Navigator — AI for Access

BioImage.IO Chatbot — Your AI Assistant for Bioimage Analysis