A Modern Correlative Workflow Environment to Master the Multi-scale Challenge

In most fields of study, it is imperative to understand the behavior of a system across several length scales in three dimensions in order to properly address the structural parameters that govern its performance. In order to characterize a system, be it the brain, a structural metal alloy, or a porous rock reservoir, multiple microscopic methods have evolved to specialize in capturing a relatively well defined window of scales, modalities or dimensions of information. Examples of this include medical-CT, confocal light microscopy, X-ray tomography, FIBSEM tomography, serial block face SEM, TEM tomography, atom probe tomography, and more. As these techniques have progressed individually, a clear challenge that has emerged has been how to intelligently navigate to and acquire 3D volumes of interest (from centimeter to nanometer), and, subsequently, to fuse multi-scale and multi-modality datasets in such a way that leaves the microscopist in control as recently published in the context of a corrosion study [1].