Technical information

Nutil is written as a stand-alone Windows 64-bit application written in Qt C++, which enables the full usage of both memory and processor cores. Nutil can be downloaded and compiled from the Github page. When performing batch processes, Nutil will utilise all cores available on the system.

The external libraries that are used in Nutil are:

TiffCreator: TiffCreator produces tiled TIFF files from JPEG, PNG and standard TIFF images, and employs the support of multiple CPUs for efficient, parallelised operations.

Transform: Transform enables rotations, scaling and thumbnail compilation of large tiff files (currently up to 4GB).

Quantifier: Quantifier identifies individual binary objects in a PNG file, while matching these to output from QuickNII. The method first finds and sorts areas by using a standard pixel filler routine. Afterwards, a random area pixel is chosen as the look-up in the binary QuickNII label slice for this particular image. When all areas have been assigned a label ID, multiple selections of predefined area IDs are assembled (ID list from the excel input file), and finally output reports are assembled and written to disk (in xlsl format). In addition, original ilastik .png files with colour/ID coding added to underlying atlas slice data are assembled and saved to the output folder.

Tip

Nutil v0.8.0 has a new automatic plotting feature. This will work if Python is installed on the computer, with the Python.exe selected in Nutil through: File –> Settings. It is also necessary to install the following Python packages on your computer: numpy, pandas and matplotlib.

Installation

  • Nutil is a stand-alone 64-bit Windows application.

  • Download as a zip archive file and extracted and run anywhere on the computer by double click on “Nutil.cmd”.

  • No installation executable is necessary, and the directory can be moved around the file system as required. Settings data are stored in the local program folder.

Hardware Requirements

  • Nutil can be executed on either a server, desktop or laptop computer.

  • It will employ all the cores available on the system. While there are no specific hardware limitations, the processing time is dependent on the system’s compute power. The more cores and memory available, the faster the operations will be performed. Running Nutil on a single-core laptop is also possible.