An Interactive Workflow to Manage Tomography Experiments at ESRF

Abstract

International audienceAt the ESRF the activity of several beamlines is based upon tomography X-ray imaging in various fields such as Paleontology, Medical Imaging and Materials Science. The instrument control and data processing systems are cloned on all the relevant beamlines, however the steps of the processing pipeline from the data acquisition to their full exploitation in premier quality publications are based upon a heterogeneous software scenario comprised of e.g. SPEC, Python, Octave, PyHST2 and MATLAB modules. The need has thus clearly appeared to logically sequence the operations performed by these different actors into user-friendly workflows. At the ESRF we selected a generic workflow tool, Orange, which was originally developed at the University of Ljubljana and designed for data mining in collaboration with the open source community. The graphical interface enables the easy inclusion/exclusion of functionalities represented by individual boxes. Each box can be managed by simple pieces of Python code generating graphical interfaces via the PyQT5 library and is defined by a set of inputs and outputs which can be linked together to produce consistent data processing workflows