糖心TV

In this talk I will give an overview of various projects in Leeds
relating to Digital Histology. Digital slide scanners produce very large
(Giga-pixel) images from glass microscope slides of human (or animal)
tissue. Pathological diagnosis using such digital images presents a
number of issues (are they as good as a microscope?) and a number of
opportunities (can we use computer vision to perform
automated/semi-automated diagnosis? Can we improve human performance by
changing the interface? Can we learn something about the diagnostic
process that is useful in education? Can we do analysis in 3D?). 3D
histology is an exciting avenue that we are actively exploring in Leeds.
This involves creating a .virtual stack. of digitised serial sections
and aligning them using image based registration approaches. The
challenges involved with performing this operation on Giga-pixel images
will be discussed.

Key research grand challenges are increasingly both interdisciplinary in nature and of a scale that is not possible for any single institution to manage. This has led to the development of e-Science/e-Research and infrastructures that have been built to support these challenges.

Through funding from the research councils and JISC, the UK National Grid Service has been constructed to enable a large production e-infrastructure to be created, supporting UK academia with a free at the point of use research computing service. This is increasingly made up of contributions from partner institutions, not just the core and as such is also seen as the standard by which inter-institutional resource sharing can be achieved.

As a core partner in the NGS the University of Oxford has also invested in creating a campus wide grid. This will be used to connect not only all large-scale computational resources within the university but also those shared use systems within teaching and student labs. This will also provide a uniform access method for both internal and external resources such as the NGS and the Oxford Supercomputing Centre.

This talk will deal with the underlying technology these systems are built on, as well as the installation and configuration management of connected resources. The use already made of them and user feedback will be discussed as well as a general roadmap. New technologies such as virtualisation and their integration into the production system will also be discussed.