Multiple Images (Stacks)

NIH Image has the capability of handling stacks of images, such as those making up a three dimensional data set. Boron stack.pics is an example of a stack of 50 Boron images (Gillen, 1994) of grain boundaries in a steel sample. The images were taken at equal time intervals with an ion microscope, which etches away the surface at a more or less constant rate. The images thus approximate serial sections of the steel sample. (The stacks can be saved in two formats - PICS and TIFF. The boron stack requires 618K in PICS format and 4232K in TIFF format. The TIFF format is more widely used, but the PICS format was used for this example to save space.)

Load the stack using the file - open command. (This will require more memory than the 4000K recommended for all the preceding steps. With 4000K of memory assigned to NIH Image, only 13 of the 50 slices will be loaded. The following steps can be performed on this abbreviated stack, however.) The images will be displayed one by one as they are loaded, giving a view going down through the sample. When loaded, the stack is displayed with the Fire-1 color table, or thermal scale (Fig. 20). Note the "(1/50)" in the title bar indicating that the image shown is the first of fifty images in the stack. (Note 3. The white diamond in the title bar indicates that the image is density calibrated, in this case, because "Invert Pixel Values" was selected.) The > and Stacks - Next Slice and Stacks - Last Slice can be used to view other images in the stack. The options - grayscale command can be used to view the images as they were originally acquired. Under some conditions, such as after switching back from the finder with the 'Load System LUT on switching' option set with the options - preferences command, the system palette, which is useless for this data set, will be in effect. The gray scale or thermal scale can be restored using the either the options - grayscale command or the options - color tables - Fire-1 command.

fig-20

Figure 20-- The stack of images (Boron stack.pics) as it appears after loading. First image in the stack of 50 is displayed, with a thermal scale. Image dimension - 100 m.
The stack can be viewed in a variety of ways. The stacks - animate command cycles through the images, showing them as a movie. The stacks - make montage command shows images taken in equal intervals throughout the stack as a composite (Fig. 21).

fig-21

Figure 21-- Montage of the Boron Stack, with an Increment of 2 in the Stacks - Make Montage... dialog box.
Stacks can be viewed from other perspectives, treating the layers of the stack as another spatial dimension. When the number of images in the stack is much less than the number of pixels along the side of one of the images, the images need to be replicated to keep the volume as a whole from looking too thin. This can be done by loading the stacks macro file (in the Macros folder) with the Special - Load Macros command. (The macro capability give a powerful way to automate NIH Image. To read the macro files, open them with NIH Image as a text file (with File - Open) , or peruse them with another text editor. Programming details can be found in "About NIH Image" and "Inside Image".) The figures that follow were made with the stack after using a replication factor of 3 with the newly loaded Special - Replicate Slices command. This triples the amount of memory required (17 MB assigned in the File - Get Info dialog box after selecting NIH Image in the finder), but thickens the stack so that the slice - slice distance approximates the pixel-pixel distance within an image. The replication of the slices renders the grain structure with the correct scaling when viewed from the side or from oblique angles. If that amount of memory is not available, the following steps can still be performed. The aspect ratio of the flattened images can be corrected using the Edit - Scale and Rotate... command.

Using the Stacks - Reslice command, the stack can be viewed in a plane perpendicular to the plane of the images as determined by the line selection tool (Fig. 22). The resulting image is shown in Fig. 23.

fig-22

Figure 22-- Line selection for viewing stack along plane perpendicular to the images - see next figure.
fig-23
Figure 23-- Boron stack viewed perpendicular to images in plane intersecting dotted line, Fig. 22.
The stack can also be rendered as a synthetic volume using the Stacks - Project command, which shows the images as if they were printed on clear plastic, and stacked on one another in order to show the three dimensional object as embedded in a plastic cube. The command generates a new stack of images, each image being a synthesized view of the 'plastic cube' as viewed from a particular angle. The angles are chosen at equal intervals of rotation about the x, y or z axis so that when the new Projection stack is animated, the 'plastic cube' appears to rotate, giving a strong illusion of three-dimensionally. There are a variety of options to this command, that affect the opacity of the 'plastic' and the structures in the image, all of which are explained in 'About NIH Image'. Fig. 24 shows the first image, generated with the default settings, except that 'Brightest point' rather than 'Nearest Point' was used. Fig. 25 shows a montage of this stack. This operation takes about 2.5 minutes per frame on a Mac IIfx or about 22 seconds per frame on a PowerMac 6100/60. This operation also requires more memory, however there is an automatic option to store the projected stack on to the disk as separate images when sufficient RAM is not available. They can then be recombined later into a stack, and animated to view the grain structure in 'simulated 3-D'.

fig-24

Figure 24-- Synthetic volume rendering of Boron Stack, done with the Stacks - Project command (see text). First frame - top view, gray scale.
fig-25
Figure 25-- Volume rendering of boron stack - montage of every other frame showing different rotations, gray scale. The three-dimensional structure of these grain boundaries is more apparent upon viewing the animation of this stack using the Stacks - Animate command.

[Index] [Next]