SPARC Optical Microscopy Imaging Data and Imaging Metadata Standard

The Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program is funded by the US National Institutes of Health with the goal of accelerating development of therapeutic devices and identification of neural targets for bioelectronic medicine. The purpose of this standard is to ensure a consistent set of microscopy imaging-specific metadata for primary and derivative imaging data across the SPARC ecosystem is included in experimental datasets. Microscopy imaging data is a common experimental modality, and is inherently diverse. Variability in the experimental sample preparation as well as microscopy settings, methods and equipment all contribute to the complexity. This document establishes a metadata standard so that microscopy data on SPARC.science portal provides relevant context, and imaging metadata standards. Note that this recommendation is optical microscopy image-specific and is meant to be used in conjunction with the existing SPARC Dataset Minimum Information Standard.