Extending Deep Zoom technology allows not only viewing terabytes (TB) of images efficiently but also recording a customized path through the deluge of image files, overlaying images, and collecting measurements interactively. We designed a Web Deep Zoom Toolkit (WDZT) to enable a spectrum of interactive measurements over TB images. An example of the web browser interface is shown in Figure 1.
Our work has been motivated by live cell microscopy image analyses that deal with about 241,920 image tiles (~0.677 TB) per experiment. Each experiment is represented by 18x14 spatial image tiles of two color channels (phase contrast and green fluorescent protein) acquired over 5 days every 15 minutes. Given hundreds of thousands of image tiles, it is extremely difficult to inspect the current 2D+time images by multiple experts in a contiguous spatial and temporal context without preprocessing (calibration, image stitching), and Deep Zoom enabled, browser-based visualization. Even after overcoming preprocessing and Deep Zoom pyramid building computational challenges and storage issues (about 6,091,378 pyramid files in 16,225 folders per experiment), cell biology research challenges remain. There is a need to compare image intensity values across acquired channels and additional layers of extracted information (e.g., intensity statistics over cell colonies). Furthermore, the challenges lie in recording visual inspections of Deep Zoom renderings of expert-defined interesting subsets in order to document, share and perform further scientific analyses on subsets.
We developed a visualization system that enables a spectrum of interactive capabilities. The capabilities are described in detail at on-line help web page.
The deployment of all functionalities at isg.nist.gov with multiple terabyte-sized images
The code has been deposited to GitHub at this URL.
The paper: Paul Khouri-Saba, Antoine Vandecreme, Mary Brady and Peter Bajcsy, “Deep Zoom Movie: Advanced Interactions with Terabytes of Image Data,” SPIE Newsroom, 24 May 2013, SPIE Newsroom. DOI: 10.1117/2.1201305.004866, https://spie.org/x93885.xml. (download pdf)
Antoine Vandecreme, Peter Bajcsy, Nicholas W.M. Ritchie, and John Henry J. Scott, “Interactive Analysis of Terabyte-sized SEM-EDS Hyperspectral Images,” Microscopy and Microanalyses, Hartford, CT, August 3-7, 2014
-Paul Khouri-Saba, Antoine Vandecreme, Mary Brady and Peter Bajcsy, “Deep Zoom Movie: Advanced Interactions with Terabytes of Image Data,” SPIE Newsroom, 24 May 2013, SPIE Newsroom. DOI: 10.1117/2.1201305.004866, https://spie.org/x93885.xml. (download pdf)