RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 ConfocalGN: a minimalistic confocal image simulator JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 088906 DO 10.1101/088906 A1 Serge Dmitrieff A1 François Nédélec YR 2016 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/11/21/088906.abstract AB We developed a user-friendly software to generate synthetic confocal microscopy images from a ground truth specified as a 3D bitmap with pixels of arbitrary size. The software can analyze a real confocal stack to derivate noise parameters and will use them directly to generate new images with similar noise characteristics. Such synthetic images can then be used to assert the quality and robustness of an image analysis pipeline, as well as be used to train machine-learning image analysis procedures. We illustrate the approach with closed curves corresponding to the microtubule ring present in blood platelets.Availability and implementation ConfocalGN is written in MATLAB but does not require any toolbox. The source code is distributed under the GPL 3.0 licence on https://github.com/SergeDmi/ConfocalGN.