As the ImageJ family of programs moves forward, Rasband continues to play a large part in maintenance and support of ImageJ. While he retired in 2010 after 40 years as a programmer at the Research Services Branch, he now volunteers with the Section of Instrumentation at NIH and works closely with the Center for Information Technology at the NIH, which hosts the ImageJ website and mailing list. Rasband works to fix bugs, add features requested by users, and manage the website and mailing list. The continued popularity and growth of ImageJ throughout the scientific community has surprised Rasband. The ImageJ website gets about 7,000 visitors a day, and there are about 1,900 subscribers to the ImageJ mailing list. A recent PubMed Central search of “ImageJ” returned over 20,000 papers over its life span. Furthermore, ImageJ has been used in teaching such as with the creation of an image processing textbook 14 that illustrates imaging processing examples using ImageJ. Rasband hopes to see the continued use and evolution of ImageJ as a teaching and research tool as more people recognize and understand its capabilities.
