Factors to keep in mind when introducing virtual microscopy

Abstract

Digitization of glass slides and delivery of so-called virtual slides (VS) emulating a real microscope over the Internet have become reality due to recent improvements in technology. We have implemented a virtual microscope for instruction of medical students and for continuing medical education. Up to 30,000 images per slide are captured using a microscope with an automated stage. The images are post-processed and then served by a plain hypertext transfer protocol (http)-server. A virtual slide client (vMic) based on Macromedia's Flash MX, a highly accepted technology available on every modern Web browser, has been developed. All necessary virtual slide parameters are stored in an XML file together with the image. Evaluation of the courses by questionnaire indicated that most students and many but not all pathologists regard virtual slides as an adequate replacement for traditional slides. All our virtual slides are publicly accessible over the World Wide Web (WWW) at http://vmic.unibas.ch . Recently, several commercially available virtual slide acquisition systems (VSAS) have been developed that use various technologies to acquire and distribute virtual slides. These systems differ in speed, image quality, compatibility, viewer functionalities and price. This paper gives an overview of the factors to keep in mind when introducing virtual microscopy.

Quantitative and qualitative changes in teaching histology by means of virtual microscopy in an introductory course in human anatomy

“…Administrative advantages include the ability to have all of the students view the same slide at the same time (Blake et al, 2003;Krippendorf and Lough, 2005;Becker, 2006;Glatz-Krieger et al, 2006;Pinder et al, 2008). This permits students a more equitable study experience and also allows the instructor to demonstrate a feature or structure to multiple students at once without the need for video-equipped microscopes and televisions (for higher quality images than most projectors), which add further costs.…”

Construction and implementation of a comprehensive hematopathology virtual teaching set

“…The reliance on high magnification review also requires more time and data storage resources as compared to virtual microscopy of non-hematopathology specimens. Increasing the scanning magnification to ×40 as compared to the standard ×20 suitable for other types of surgical specimens greatly increases the scanning time, and adding oil immersion scanning for peripheral blood and bone marrow aspirate smears (×50-100) often necessitates software algorithms such as "z-sharpening" to extract the sharpest areas from the different focal planes and combine into a synthesized image [17,18]. All of these additional requirements result in significantly larger files.…”

A Web-Based Solution for Viewing Large-Sized Microscopic Images

“…The video camera method uses linear-array detectors to create seamless complete slide images, and the still camera method uses a fixed-area camera to capture thousands of individual image tiles and joins them together to create a large mosaic of a single slide. 1,13 Dedicated methods such as neural networks or global geometric and radiometric transformation have been developed in order to correct overlapping areas and/or other image artifacts.…”

“…1 These systems are currently being used not only to improve the teaching and learning efficacies of histology and pathology in medical school education 2-7 but also for telemedicine, academic conferences, and workshops; 8,9 they could also be used in clinical diagnosis if quality assurance, image quality, and hardware/software were improved. 1,[9][10][11][12] To achieve this aim, complete slides of specimens must be scanned and digitized using a high-resolution microscope, the results of which are very large digital images (in the order of gigabytes for each slide). Images of this size are too large to be handled by conventional DICOM viewers, and the transfer of such large images through DICOM network protocols involves large overheads.…”