Pipelines are built from basic building blocks called operations. The operations are sorted into categories:

• Image processing operations allow you to modify the pixel values to facilitate the segmentation of structures of interest. To understand more about image filtering, please check our other articles on the topic.
• Segmentation is the process of creating objects from the pixel values in the image. We can extract Features from these objects to quantify differences between objects in an image and between different samples.
• Use objects: because the segmentation on its own is rarely enough to extract all the information that we want from our images, and segmentation is rarely 100% accurate, it is often necessary to take segmented objects and modify them somehow. These operations can include:
• Labelling positive or negative objects.
• Tracking objects through time.
• Identifying inter-object relationships such as parent-child relationships or distance measurements.
• ...
• Export operations allow us to generate information that can be used in other packages, including numerical results of our analysis for data analytics, masks of segmentation results for analysis in 3rd party software, and 3D surfaces of the segmented objects

Adding operations to the pipeline is as easy as clicking the + Add operations... button, searching for the operation we need, and then placing it into our pipeline by either: double-clicking the operation we need, dragging-&-dropping the operation to correct position in our pipeline, or simply typing in the Enter key for the highlighted operation.

In our pipeline above, we use a range of these operations.