Jacob Bastacky had a problem. Bastacky, who heads the Life
Sciences Division's Lung Microscopy Group, has accumulated thousands of
images of lung tissue. The image collection -- a research and reference
database -- has grown over the years and now fills a five-foot-tall
stack of file boxes in his office.
Finding a particular image is a surmountable problem for
Bastacky but it is almost impossible for anyone else. Intent
upon making this large photo archive more accessible, the
researcher has become the first user of an online Image Library
now being developed at the lab.
"Right now," says Bastacky, "we have about a thousand images in the online collection. That will double very soon. This system allows us to organize these images, to search and find individual images, and to view these images in several resolutions. What's more, because it is accessed through the World Wide Web, we can make the collection as widely available as we choose."
The Image Library is being developed by the Information and Computing
Science Division's Imaging and Distributed Computing Group, which is
led by Bill Johnston. Mary Thompson heads the project.
Thompson says the design of the Image Library accommodates a wide range
of potential uses. Private collections of images can be created as
well as public collections. Images can be stored in a central mass
storage system or on a desktop computer. And, the World Wide Web
allows public collections to be accessed from anywhere and on any kind
of computer.
Says Thompson, "This is a research project that is in a test stage.
Ultimately, it might become part of a labwide digital library. Also, it
could be deployed as a set of portable tools that individuals could use
with their own digital image archives."
Currently, Thompson is seeking several additional image collections.
These collections would be put online and their owners given the
opportunity to use and test the Image Library during its development
stage. Those interested should check out the
Image Library online and
contact Thompson at X7408 or via e-mail at
MRThompson@LBL.gov.
More and more scientific data now consists of high-resolution digital
images. Whether they originate in digital format or as prints that
have been scanned, the starting point for an Image Library collection
is a set of high-resolution digital images. The next step is for the
collection owner to write a corresponding set of text files. Each image
must have a companion text file. These files consist of a caption
containing keywords that distinguish individual images from one
another.
To install the collection, the owner navigates to the Image Library on
the Web. Authorized individuals can use the online forms to submit
their images, organize them into sets and subsets, and determine who
has access to the collection.
When an image is submitted to the Image Library, Thompson's software
automatically stores it and creates a set of four lower resolution
images. It also reads every text file and creates a keyword database
that makes it possible to find specific images within a collection.
To find an image, individuals may use a form on the Web, typing in
keywords to launch a search. The Image Library responds by finding all
images that match the search terms and displaying each in thumbnail
size. Next, the person browsing the collection is given the option of
viewing higher resolution versions of each image. Individuals who are
unfamiliar with the contents of an image collection also can opt to
simply look at all the "thumbnails" in that set.
The Image Library allows collection owners to add new images, to
rearrange the directories in which they are organized, and to edit text
files. This leaves the control of the collection in the hands of its
owner.
Jacob Bastacky says the Image Library not only solved a problem but
also has opened up new possibilities. Bastacky's research group not
only uses Image Library to improve access to their own private
collection but also has published a public collection of images.
This educational project, called the
Lung Lab Tour, includes a set of images of the lung made with the
Scanning Electron Microscope.
"Lung Tour is educational but it also is an experiment," says Bastacky.
"The idea is to make what you see online mimic what you see during a
microscope experiment. First, you start with a lower magnification
image, find something in that image that is of interest, then zoom in
at higher and higher magnifications, all the way down to the level of
individual cells. I call it hyperimage databasing but the important
point is that this is a computer filing system where images are linked
in a logical manner. In the future, we would like to organize our data
like this."