HIT: A fully automated mosaicking software for corneal confocal microscopy

In vivo confocal microscopy (IVCM) provides high-quality image data of the living human cornea with cellular resolution. Leveraging the diagnostic potential of IVCM of the subbasal nerve plexus and corneal immune cells, in particular, is an active field of research. However, the small field of view of high-resolution IVCM represents a serious limitation for many possible applications. The presented software HIT creates motion-corrected wide-field montages from large IVCM image datasets and overcomes the shortcomings of other approaches. HIT is a cross-platform, open-source C++ software and provides its fully automated workflow with a straightforward graphical user interface. HIT makes state-of-the-art mosaicking software for large IVCM datasets widely available and opens up entirely new opportunities for all research groups in this field.