In 2003 I was blown away with the news of the first widely published gigapixel image, by Max Lyons. In fact seeing the gigapixel image (comprised of one billion pixels) of Bryce Canyon sparked my interest in digital panoramic photography (see Mastering Digital Panoramic Photography).
Today I’m blown away by the news of the first terapixel image (comprised of one trillion pixels). Unlike the more scenic gigapixel image of Bryce Canyon this image is medically related combining 225 pathology slides from a sample of breast tissue. Quite a feat and a sign of the times with increased computing power of desktop machines and the increased resolution of digital sensor. I wonder how long before the next numerical landmark, a quadrillion pixel image, will be reached.
Technology wise what is even more impressive about this is Aperio, the company to accomplish this feat, is releasing their file format to the open source community.
Aperio Technologies, Inc., the leading provider of digital pathology systems and services for the healthcare and life sciences industry, is pleased to announce it has implemented support for BigTIFF – Tagged Image File Format for files which are larger than 4 gigabytes – across all its products and systems. This enhancement to the TIFF standard enables image files larger than 4GB to be created and processed, in a backward-compatible fashion. As part of its commitment to open standards, Aperio has donated these enhancements to the public domain, and is working with the TIFF standards body to incorporate them into a future standard release.
(Aperio press release)
It took some digging due to bad links on various news sources but here it is…
see the first terapixel image
[tags]terapixel image, gigapixel image, terapixel, gigapixel, BigTIFF, TIFF, Tagged Image File Format, digital, photography, breast, breast cancer, pathology, Aperio, technology[/tags]
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