I'm a consultant and work in AI and cloud stuff - do these lab instruments have cameras or ways to feed the images into an ai model? I can see about creating something basic for you.
The LIF is a binary blob wrapped in an XML structure. There has been some good work done by the people Open Microscopy Environment building some Java libraries for parsing these files, but to be quite frank I'm a bit rough around the edges when it comes to working with Java and all the computer vision stuff I know is in Python and C++.
If you're serious about this offer, then I can look into getting you some samples (if you can't easily find them yourself). But full disclosure, I don't think any PI or lab that I know of would be able to afford GPU compute hours, but most of them have access to a cluster, so if you can deliver a JAR (or a Docker container) I could demonstrate how they could quickly deploy that themselves on their own hardware.
I can take a Stab, but the file format and Java stuff could be a problem. Let's see