Aperio Technologies 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's terapixel image of breast cancer tissue.
“This enhancement makes it possible to create very large high resolution digitized images of bone marrow and peripheral blood smears as part of my work with Aperio’s new high power oil immersion ScanScopes,†stated Douglas Tkachuk, MD and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto.
Aperio's ScanScope slide scanning systems create digital images of entire microscope slides at gigapixel resolution in minutes. These digital slide images are very large, with dimensions that routinely exceed 100,000 x 100,000 pixels. The TIFF standard is perfect for storing digital slides - it is an open standard supported by a large number of applications on a wide variety of platforms. Until recently TIFF files were limited in size to 4GB, or about 30 gigapixels. With BigTIFF support it is now possible to store images of all sizes, including those larger than 4GB, in the TIFF format. The BigTIFF design was first proposed in 2004 by Joris Van Damme of Aware Systems, and has been refined in online discussions on the TIFF message boards.
“Aperio believes strongly in open standards and anticipates that with this enhancement, TIFF will continue to be the standard for storing and managing very large images such as digital slides,†stated Ole Eichhorn, chief technology officer for Aperio.
The libtiff library is an open-source cross-platform library which enables applications software to read and write images stored as TIFF files. A new version of libtiff has been created by Aperio which supports BigTIFF files. The new version is backward-compatible with previous versions and in many cases applications software will not have to change in order to create and process BigTIFF files. Aperio has posted detailed information at
BigTIFF version of libtiff library including an overview of the changes, sample BigTIFF images, source code and library downloads, and technical details for the changes which have been made.
As a demonstration of the new capabilities of libtiff, Aperio has created the world’s first terapixel image. (1 terapixel = 1 trillion pixels.) This image is over one million pixels wide, and consists of 225 copies of a breast cancer digital slide combined together. This amazing terapixel image was compressed into a TIFF file size of 143GB.
... here it is...
