One of the advantages of Image SXM compared to the software supplied by manufacturers of scanning microscope systems is that it can display images from a number of different manufacturers — if a laboratory has more than one scanning microscope system, which is becoming increasingly common, then the ability to compare images obtained from different systems is very important. Collaborations with researchers using many types of scanning microscopes led to the support for 50 different SXM image file formats (plus 20 non-SXM file formats that various researchers have found to be useful).

Further applications of image analysis techniques were developed and incorporated into the framework of Image SXM. In addition to the software developments that targeted scanning microscopy, many of the image processing and analysis routines that were integrated into Image SXM were of more generic use. Despite the fact that some of these new developments had no particular relevance to scanning microscopy, the title of the software was by this time well established and so it was decided not to attempt to re-brand it. Many of the applications could still be described as microscopy in one sense or another, but some were quite distinct, such as the analysis of electron diffraction patterns (with images acquired from digital cameras) or the Earth's ocean currents (with images acquired from satellites).

A breakdown of usage by discipline, partly from the internet statistics and partly from direct feedback from users, indicates that most users identify themselves as working in medicine (25%), physics (20%), biology (15%), chemistry (15%), engineering (10%), geosciences (10%) or materials science (5%). Many users work in interdisciplinary fields, but this has been simplified for the purposes of presenting the statistics.

The Image SXM application is downloaded by users in universities, research institutes, medical centres and hospitals at a rate of 4,000 downloads every year. The total number of downloads since January 2008 is > 22,000 (and is estimated to be > 50,000 since its first public release).

For an example of how the automated LEED I-V data extraction routines of Image SXM have been used, see J. Chem. Phys. 123 (2005).

Scanning Tunnelling Microscope (STM) images of the molecules may have the spatial resolution to distinguish different molecular orientations, but rapid analysis of the populations of all the possible orientations requires a customised image analysis algorithm. For an example of how such analysis was used, see the paper on the mapping of complex chiral adlayers published in J. Phys. Chem. C 115 (2011).

MIASMA is the result of a number of these specialist applications having some common ground and so benefiting from being considered as part of a larger, overarching project. A number of MIASMA projects are described under and on a separate MIASMA web page.

The book Image Analysis in Earth Sciences by Heilbronner and Barrett summarises the application of all of the image analysis concepts and algorithms embedded in Image SXM to the quantitative analysis of the crystallographic orientation and texture of rock samples.