Manual stage acquisition and interactive display of digital slides in histopathology

More powerful PC architectures, high resolution cameras working at increasing frame rates, more and more accurate motorized microscopes have boosted new applications in the field of biomedicine and medical imaging. In histopathology, the use of Digital Slides (DS) imaging through dedicated hardware for digital pathology is increasing for several reasons: digital annotation of suspicious lesions, recorded clinical history and telepathology as a collaborative environment. In this work we propose the first method known in literature for real-time whole slide acquisition and displaying conceived for conventional non-automated microscopes. Differently from DS scanner, our software enables biologist and histopathologists to build and view the DS in real-time while inspecting the sample, as they are accustomed to. In addition, since our approach is compliant with existing common microscope positions, provided with camera and PC, this could contribute to disseminate the whole slide technology on the majority of small labs not endowed with DS hardware facilities. Experiments performed with different histologic specimens (referring to tumor tissues of different body parts as well as to tumor cells), acquired under different setup conditions and devices, prove the effectiveness of our approach both in terms of quality and speed performances.