BIO: Wesley De Boever
Wesley De Boever is Product Sales Manager at TESCAN, based in Ghent, Belgium. He has a background in geology, mainly focusing on the behavior and structure of natural building stones, both in historical and modern buildings.
As alumnus of Ghent University's Centre for X-Ray Tomography (UGCT) he has over 10 years experience in micro-CT, electron and light microscopy and other rock imaging techniques.
Wesley's main work and research focus is correlating (dynamic) micro-CT data with other methods such electron microscopy and focused ion beam tomography.

SUMMARY:
Imaging of specimens in geosciences serves many different needs, and is used in many sub-domains of geology. In mineralogy, quantitative information on composition and concentration of different ore minerals is of importance, as well as structural information on particle size. For geotechnical applications, evolution of a material’s under different external conditions over time needs to be understood. And for geoscientific research in energy resources parameters such as porosity, connectivity and permeability are of utmost importance. However, although the main focus can be different in all of these areas, a combination of high quality information on both composition and structure is needed in every geological subdomain.
In this presentation we show how a combination of 2D electron microscopy based techniques, including automated mineralogy, are combined with 3D information from both conventional micro-computed tomography and the emerging spectral computed tomography, is used to characterize rocks across different length scales.

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BIO: Sarawuth Wantha
• Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Doctoral degree, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany
• Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering with the focus on Biomedical Imaging Modalities and Image Processing.
• Research techniques: X-Ray CT, MRI, Electron microscopy, Fluorescence Imaging
(confocal, light-sheet, multi-photon, STED microscopy).
• Post-Doctoral research: Cardiac Electrophysiology & Stem Cell-derived Cardiomyocytes.
• Extensive experience in image processing software.

SUMMARY:
The complexity of unconventional rocks due to their multiscale structures have drawn increasing attention in recent years, for quantitative measurement using a modern image analysis system.

X-Ray Computed tomography (CT) imaging has the advantages of high accuracy and being nondestructive and is widely used in the field of rock physics. The use of high-resolution 3D X-ray CT has become widely accepted to create a digital twin of the material under investigation.
Digital Rock Analysis (DRA) is the study of rock samples by use of rock imagery data with the goal of understanding rock properties. Its use of non-destructive methods to determine permeability or effective elastic rock properties, have developed significantly and become a complementary part in reservoir characterization over the past decades with the emphasis changing from phenomenological research towards quantitative modelling.
Thermo Scientific Avizo and PerGeos Software are comprehensive Digital Rock Analysis solutions that provides geologists with advanced analytical tools to better evaluate the reservoir quality.

From whole core X-Ray CT to nano SEM imaging, our software is the most robust and versatile solution for Digital Rock Analysis trusted by Oil & Gas peers. Its visualization, processing, and analysis of 2D and 3D digital rock imagery enables geophysicists, petro-physicists, core analysts, and reservoir engineers to improve evaluation of reservoir quality and faster understand static and dynamic rock properties that impact production.

In our Application Software department, we are focused on developing high-performance 3D visualization and analysis software tools for scientific and industrial data. Wherever three-dimensional imaging data sets need to be processed, our Software solution offer abundant state-of-the-art image data processing, exploration and analysis features within an intuitive workflow and easy-to-use graphical user interface.

We have integrated AI-assisted tools for segmentation using a shallow neural network in combination of patches strategically positioned in the images. Users can now use the power of AI in a very intuitive and quick way on any data, and get the AI assisted segmentation tool to do most of the work segmenting the images. This can dramatically improve your productivity on challenging datasets.

With our latest release, we have introduced the new modules of deep learning training both 2D and 3D segmentation. We have significantly enhanced the prediction of results which results in a better adoption of deep learning tools for faster segmentation in 2D through single large 2D data slice tiling while increase quality of segmentation in 3D.

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BIO: Tom Bradwell
Dr Tom Bradwell is a Lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Stirling, specializing in Quaternary geology and landscape change. Between 2001 and 2015 he was a survey geologist and senior scientist at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh. His main research focuses on using geomorphological mapping, sedimentological analysis and dating techniques, onshore and offshore, to reconstruct former ice sheets and understand their response to external drivers. Tom was a Transect Leader on the recent multi-institution NERC-funded BRITICE-CHRONO project. Much of Tom’s fieldwork over the last 20 years has been in Iceland, NW Scotland and in UK offshore waters. He has authored / co-authored over 80 peer-reviewed publications and book chapters.

SUMMARY:
The reconstruction of glaciers and ice sheets is vitally important for understanding past and future global environmental change. Ice-rafted debris forms a key component of these ice sheet reconstructions and represents a powerful proxy for past iceberg presence. We investigate the potential of state-of-the-art high-resolution non-destructive X-ray Computed Laminography (CL) for characterising sediment properties and in particular for quantifying the abundance of gravel clasts, or ice-rafted debris, in glaciomarine sediments. We devise a plugin for the freely available FIJI/ImageJ programme which can extract mean or median X-ray grey values and standard deviations - proxies for sediment density and sediment heterogeneity, respectively. We propose that the X-ray Computed Laminography output and new ImageJ tool have the potential to quantitatively analyse and automatically characterise ice-rafted debris as well as other 3-D structures, including void space, in Quaternary glaciomarine sediments.

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BIO: Rich Taylor
Rich completed a PhD in Experimental Petrology at the University of Edinburgh in 2009, before moving to Curtin University in Western Australia as a SIMS laboratory specialist. He subsequently held research positions in the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Curtin studying geochemistry and geochronology, specialising in imaging and microanalysis. In 2017 he moved to the University of Cambridge to study magnetic inclusions in Earth’s oldest materials using novel microscopy techniques. In 2019 Rich moved to Zeiss based in Cambourne, UK to take on the global Geosciences Applications Development role.

SUMMARY:

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BIO: Piotr Szymczak
Piotr Szymczak received his PhD degree in physics from the University of Warsaw (Poland) in 2001. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Florida (USA) before joining University of Warsaw as a faculty. He now heads the Department of Complex Systems Modeling at the Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw. He was a visiting professor at several research institutions, including the Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (France) and Sorbonne University in Paris. Research within his group focuses on the intersection between physics and geosciences with a particular emphasis on reactive flow and dissolution processes in porous and fractured rock. He has published over 100 papers in top peer-reviewed journals and edited two books. He is currently a member of the Editorial board of Water, Capillarity and was a guest editor in Frontiers in Physics.

SUMMARY:
Dissolution of porous media introduces positive feedback between fluid transport and chemical reactions at mineral surfaces leading to the formation of pronounced wormhole-like channels. While the impact of flow rate and reaction rate on the shapes of the wormholes is now well understood, much less is known about the dynamics of their propagation. In this communication, we show how the evolution of wormholes and their effects on flow patterns can be captured by in-situ X-ray microCT imaging of dissolving limestone cores. 4D tomography allows us in particular to correlate the permeability changes in a dissolving core with the advancement of the tip position of the wormhole. The analysis of such correlations allows one to detect the highly cemented regions in the core which act as permeability barriers, which the wormhole tries to bypass.

Finally, we show how to supplement this information with the analysis of the flow patterns. The latter can be obtained by injecting a contrast solution while scanning the sample in the tomograph. This data allows us to quantify the competition between the wormhole branches, which drives the evolution of the wormholing pattern.

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