Open Microscopy Environment

This is a question about the Olympus format, and in particular how it is handled by the reader.

Normally there is a vsi file next to a similarly named directory like this

test_sample.vis
_test_sample_
and in test sample there is a directory named
[u]stack1_/u]
and under it will be the file test_sample.est

My question is
If there are additional stack directories , what do they represent?
For example in a sample I user I saw
statck1
stack10001
How is this used?
I see the code that shows how the reader will pull in the file, but what that data represents is a a mystery to me.

Does anyone have any thoughts?
Thanks!

Each stack directory represents a separate slide that is in some way related to the other slides in the parent directory. The .ets files each contain an entire imaged slide at varying resolution levels - generally the highest imaged resolution, and then 50% reductions down to about a 512x512 thumbnail.

The reader will show one "series" (i.e. 5-dimensional set of images) for each image in the parent .vsi file, and one series for each resolution level in each of the .ets files.

As far as I know, it is up to whoever performs the acquisition to choose which slides end up in a single .vsi dataset, so the way in which .ets files relate to each other from a pathology perspective may vary.