A Visualization Cloud Service for X-CT DICOM Images Applied to Deep-sea Drilled Core Database

Abstract

The deep-sea drilling vessel named as "CHIKYU"producted by JAMSTEC has riser coring system of which ability enables to keep drilling into thousands meters below deep subseafloor safely and continuously. The drilled sample consists of sediment and rock obtained from the seafloor is generally called as a "core sample". One of the special equipments onboard is an X-ray CT scanner to investigate internal structures of the core sample visually. The scanned data including 3D information saved into the DICOM format and stored as digital archive of core samples. The digital archive gives many opportunities to researchers exploring micro-structures, vein minerals, sedimentary structures and study of mega-thrust at the tectonic-accretionary prism. All people can find and download original DICOM file of the core sample via web site of the Kochi Institute for Core Sample Research, JAMSTEC. A file size of the DICOM file for 150 cm of a core section, which is the general length of IODP core section, becomes more than 400 MByte that have been bringing difficulties to users who deal with many core section images. To resolve the drawback for dealing with the heavy DICOM files of the core samples, we need to develop a novel system for 3D rendering of DICOM file that can be accessed via the internet. This paper introduces design and implementation of the system to solve the visualization difficulties of the core samples in the geology research filed. We targeted to implement a cloud service for visualizing the core samples using simple mobile terminals such as the ones with a standard web browser or an Android application.We have developed a remote rendering service that constructs 2D images from the slice image data set of DICOM processed in a GPU cluster environment, and transfers the 2D image saved in a common image format to the client side. The service also provides various visualization functionalities to browse the core samples such as cutting, rotating, coloring etc. remotely processing the DICOM image data.