ImageX 3.0: a full stack imaging archive solution

Over the past several years we have faced the need to develop a number of solutions to address the challenge of archiving large-format scientific imaging data and seamlessly visualizing that data—irrespective of the image format—on a web browser. ImageX is a ground-up rewrite and synthesis of our solutions to this issue, with a goal of reducing the workload required to transition from simply storing vast amounts of scientific imaging data on disk to securely archiving and sharing that data with the world. The components that make up the ImageX service stack include a secure and scalable back-end data service optimized for providing imaging data, a pre-processor to harvest metadata and intelligently scale and store the imaging data, and a flexible and embeddable front-end visualization web application. Our latest version of the software suite called ImageX 3.0 has been designed to meet the needs of a single user running locally on their own personal computer or scaled up to provide support for the image storage and visualization needs of a modern observatory with the intention of providing a ’Push button’ solution to a fully deployed solution. Each ImageX 3.0 component is provided as a Docker container, and can be rapidly and seamlessly deployed to meet demand. In this paper, we describe the ImageX architecture while demonstrating many of its features, including intelligent image scaling with adaptive histograms, load-balancing, and administrative tools. On the user-facing side we demonstrate how the ImageX 3.0 viewer can be embedded into the content of any web application, and explore the astronomy-specific features and plugins we’ve written into it. The ImageX service stack is fully open-sourced, and is built upon widely-supported industry standards (Node.js, Angular, etc.). Apart from being deployed as a standalone service stack, ImageX components are currently in use or expected to be deployed on: (1) the ODI-PPA portal serving astronomical images taken at the WIYN Observatory in near real-time; (2) the web portal serving microscopy images taken at the IU Electron Microscopy Center; (3) the RADY-SCA portal supporting radiology and medical imaging as well as neuroscience researchers at IU.