Book excerpt: This innovative volume surveys the latest image acquisition advances in serial block face techniques in scanning electron microscopy, knife-edge scanning microscopy, and 4D imaging of multi-component biological systems. The book introduces parallel processing for biological applications. You learn advanced parallelization techniques for decomposing a problem domain and mapping it onto a parallel processing architecture using the message-passing interface (MPI) and OpenMP. Case studies show how these techniques have been successfully used in simulation tasks, data mining, and graphical visualization of biological datasets. You also find coverage of methods for developing scalable biological image databases and for facilitating greater interactive visualization of large image sets.