First 1 trillion-pixel image

Aperio's terapixel image shows extraordinary detail of breast cancer tissue.

(Credit: Aperio)

Medical imaging specialists Aperio have broken the 4GB file size limit on the TIFF image format by creating their own format called BigTIFF and offering the format into the public domain (an amazing fact in its own right). To showcase the power of BigTIFF image resolution, Aperio has released the first terapixel image. The image shows 225 pathology slides of breast tissue and can be viewed and explored online (it looks surprisingly like a pink version of Google Earth once you start zooming in).

The image's actual file size as a compressed BigTIFF is 143GB, so don't expect to be shooting terapixel photos on your digital camera anytime soon. To make this kind of resolution useful, Aperio had to use a high-power oil immersion ScanScope slide-scanning system to get the necessary detail.

(via Medgadget)

[Hep Cat]

So, now tiling scans is news?

As the example file is a tiled image consisting of hundreds of very
finely-scanned images, I'm not sure what the ultimate point of a
"terapixel" image like this is - it just lots of scans stitched together.

What's more newsworthy about this is Aperio's BigTIFF format and
it's release into the public domain. Anyone could write a Photoshop
action to stitch a hundred 8000 dpi scans together - but without
BigTIFF, the file would never save to disk.