“We’ve added a new front-end and new search capabilities,” says Nicole Reineke, product manager at AccuSoft. Specifically, the new user interface lets researchers organize and place commonly used analysis tools in a customized pattern that makes sense for their work. The enhanced search capability offers a new method for searching glyphs, which are programs designed to perform an operation (glyphs are represented by icons in a VisiQuest workspace).

One key feature of VisiQuest is its Visual Programming Environment (VPE), which lets researchers quickly create complex workflows to automate data analysis procedures. For example, the VPE lets a researcher set up a series of analysis steps by dragging operator icons (the glyphs) to the VisiQuest workspace. Successive steps in an analysis procedure are dropped onto the workspace and then linked. When used to analyze data, as each step in a process is completed, the output of that operation is passed along to the next operational step. New in this release is the ability to create and export Active X programs directly from the Visual Programming workspace.

AccuSoft also increased the number of data file formats VisiQuest can work with directly. Of particularly interest to life scientists is the added support for TWAIN, which is a file format often used with microscopy image files. The software now supports more than 75 file formats.

Also today, AccuSoft announced it would be developing VisiQuest toolkits for image acquisition and medical image analysis. The toolkits essentially have pre-constructed VPE workflows for analyzing and displaying data. For instance, AccuSoft currently offers a Chemoinformatics Toolkit (based on data mining technology from MESA Analytics & Computing) that includes data analysis and data mining procedures that are commonly used in a wide variety of drug discovery research areas.

VisiQuest 4.0 for Windows is available now. The new toolkits will be available in the spring.