Digital palynological slides

Digitisation of the NPD's palynological slides

Palynological slides contain fossil microplankton, pollen and spores extracted from cores and drill cuttings. Operators and consulting laboratories routinely produce palynological slides, and deliver these to the NPD in accordance with Section 29 of the petroleum management regulations. Analyses of these slides establish four geological factors in exploration and development wells: age dating of strata, correlation of strata, environment of deposition and organic content. ​

To expand the industry's understanding of the subsurface, the NPD shares palynological slides from released wells with companies and academia. Increased geological understanding reduces margins of error in geological mapping and reduces the economic risk of exploration and production. Therefore, both industry and the nation benefit from electronic access to an abundance of palynological slides.

Through collaboration with medical expertise in Sweden, Finland and Hungary, the NPD gained insight into technological advances that the fields of pathology and cytology have driven forward. Of primary relevance for geological applications is research and development in slide scanning and artificial intelligent medical diagnosis.​

The NPD applies this technology to geological disciplines based on transmitted light microscopy: palynology, petrography and nannofossil micropaleontology. Powerful client-servers stream digital slides to in an optical resolution typical of high-end light microscopes. Large 4K or 8K screens give the user a immersive visual experience that provides more information than narrow fields of view characteristic of traditional optical microscopy. The user can tag microfossils to improve taxonomic consensus and discussion between working groups. SlideViewer exports images of annotated specimens as training data for machine learning. The medical pathologist’s tools for improving diagnoses through interprofessional communication and decision-making are now available to biostratigraphers through the digital slides available for download from Diskos.​