infocus #28 December 2012 Virtual Microscopy

Coleman takes a look at the shift from traditional to digital microscopy and reviews a number of different virtual microscope systems

DOI: 10.22443/rms.inf.1.88

The last few years have seen the increasing incorporation of virtual microscopy systems in universities and biomedical laboratories as part of the evolving and dramatic changes associated with digital imaging. In many cases the traditional microscope is disappearing with the advent of the new imaging technologies (Coleman, 2009).

The four main areas involving virtual microscopy
are:
1. Telemedicine, which allows transmission of high resolution histopathological images to a distant site to receive a second opinion. This has proved very effective when pathologists in isolated medical facilities can consult with distant experts in accredited centers of excellence. To date telemedicine has been the main application of virtual microscopy systems.
2. Creating archives. Pathology laboratories can now store all their scanned high resolution pathology slides in virtual archives, allowing instant access for consultation and slide-sharing with colleagues, locally or worldwide.
3. Research studies. There are major attempts to create and commercialize software programs for automatic diagnostic analysis of scanned histopathological slides. The aim is to create the means of automatic identification and analysis of specific diseases such as breast or prostate cancer from scanned digitized slides.
4. E-learning. This involves the replacement of microscopes as teaching tools in courses such as histology or histopathology.

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Author

Raymond Coleman

Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Rappaport Faculty of Medicine, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology

Raymond Coleman received his Ph.D. in the University of Leeds in 1967 and held an appointment as Assistant Lecturer and Lecturer in the Department of Zoology, Bedford College, University of London from 1967-1973. He was awarded a Royal Society-Israel Academy Fellowship in Tel Aviv University from 1973-1975. Since 1975 he has been teaching histology in the Rappaport Faculty of Medicine of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology with an appointment as associate professor since 1989. He is currently involved in establishing a virtual histology and histopathology program for e-learning in the Technion and also on a larger scale is prime mover in the efforts to establish an Israel National Repository for Histology and Histopathology (virtual microscopy image archive). He serves as the Editor-in-Chief of Acta histochemica (Elsevier) and is on the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Societies of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry (IFSHC). At the 14th International Congress of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry, Kyoto, Japan (August 26-29, 2012), he is co-organizer of the session on virtual microscopy in conjunction with the Japanese Society for Telepathology. An historic claim to fame is his contemporary schooling with Paul McCartney and George Harrison at the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys. More recently he is proud that two of his colleagues in the Technion Faculty of Medicine (Abraham Hershko and Aaron Ciechanover) received the Nobel Prize of Chemistry in 2004 for their pioneering studies on ubiquitin and more recently for Dan Shechtman’s Nobel Prize in 2011 for his discovery of periodic quasicrystals based on his EM studies.