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Factors to keep in mind when introducing virtual microscopy

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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.

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Abbreviations

NA:

Numerical aperture

VM:

Virtual microscope

VS:

Virtual slide

VSAS:

Virtual slide acquisition system

VSS:

Virtual slide system

WWW:

World Wide Web

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Drs. Ray Barnhill, Martin Cook, Dirk Ruiter, Heinz Regele and Hermann-Josef Gröne for the contribution of cases for the VS seminars. This work has been supported by a grant of the University of Basel.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Pathology, University Hospital of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Katharina Glatz-Krieger & Michael J. Mihatsch

  2. Anatomical Institute, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Udo Spornitz

  3. Institute Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France

    Alain Spatz

  4. IT Department, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Dieter Glatz

  5. Institut für Pathologie, Schönbeinstrasse 40, CH–4031, Basel, Switzerland

    Katharina Glatz-Krieger

Authors
  1. Katharina Glatz-Krieger
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  2. Udo Spornitz
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  3. Alain Spatz
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  4. Michael J. Mihatsch
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  5. Dieter Glatz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Katharina Glatz-Krieger.

Additional information

Universal resource locators (URLs) visited at the time of writing (June 2005) may change or vanish with lapse of time. Therefore and because of usability, we have created a web page with all URLs that will be updated on a regular basis: http://kathrin.unibas.ch/pub/2005–06.

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Glatz-Krieger, K., Spornitz, U., Spatz, A. et al. Factors to keep in mind when introducing virtual microscopy. Virchows Arch 448, 248–255 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00428-005-0112-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00428-005-0112-2

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