This paper presents the application of a component-based Grid middleware system for processing extremely large images obtained from digital microscopy devices. We have developed parallel, out-of-core techniques for different classes of data processing operations employed on images from confocal microscopy scanners. These techniques are combined into a data preprocessing and analysis pipeline using the component-based middleware system. The experimental results show that: 1) our implementation achieves good performance and can handle very large datasets on high-performance Grid nodes, consisting of computation and/or storage clusters and 2) it can take advantage of Grid nodes connected over high-bandwidth wide-area networks by combining task and data parallelism.