**7. Conclusion**

The potential use of Microsoft Excel for digital image processing and analysis was successfully extended to application in biomedical imaging. This potential depends on the ability to easily extract RGB data from a variety of image file formats into Excel which is now established by the use of the RGB2X 1.0 program. However, other resources including some being online may be used in extracting the data and copying into Excel. With the data being available in Excel, the possibilities of accomplishing a wide range of biomedical image processing and analysis in Excel combined with the use of Visual Basic in Applications (VBA) is unlimited. The selection of image processing and analysis methods demonstrated in this paper including the different image enhancement methods only serve as evidence of the enormous possibilities. Other methods would need to be tested in Excel covering a wide range of images captured using different biomedical imaging modalities. This should include using image metrics to compare Excel processed image data with processing based on other software platforms. Also, the limitations of reducing larger images for visualizing as charts in Excel would need to be addressed in

future work. Finally, other aspects of image processing and analysis in Excel such as processing time requirement for completing different image processing tasks and image quality should be compared with other image processing software applications for increased understanding of the potentials and limitations of using Excel for biomedical image processing.
