Multimodal microscopy applied to ore characterization: practical aspects

摘要

Multimodal microscopy aims at combining information obtained from different microscopy modalities. Sometimes, multimodal microscopy is also referred as co-site, correlative or collaborative microscopy. The combination of optical microscopy and SEM in a multimodal procedure may improve their analytical capacity, providing discrimination of phases and features that are indistinguishable from each technique. However, this method has some practical constraints. The specimen handling and the different stages imply that translation and rotation adjustments are necessary. Besides, non-linear transformations are required for image registration due to the distortions in images from SEM. Commercial systems for multimodal microscopy are available, but they don't provide suitable registration methods, preventing image fusion for quantitative image analysis purposes. This work presents practical solutions aiming to make multimodal microscopy a routine task at lab. They include a new registration method to automatically combine image sets from optical microscope and SEM.