  SUMMARY : We developed a user-friendly software to generate synthetic
confocal microscopy images from a ground truth specified as a 3D bitmap with
pixels of arbitrary size. The software can analyze a real confocal stack to
derivate noise parameters and will use them directly to generate new images
with similar noise characteristics. Such synthetic images can then be used to
assert the quality and robustness of an image analysis pipeline, as well as be
used to train machine-learning image analysis procedures. We illustrate the
approach with closed curves corresponding to the microtubule ring present in
blood platelet. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ConfocalGN is written in
Matlab but does not require any toolbox. The source code is distributed under
the GPL 3.0 licence on https://github.com/SergeDmi/ConfocalGN.
