Typical experiments may be made up of hundreds of glass slides, being able to scan the slides into whole slide digital images allows for creation of a catalog to use, analyse, and return to at any time as new insights are gained; possibly providing a mechanism for getting more out of data in a facile way.
According to Dr. Susan Tappan a state of the art scanner created by Huron Digital Pathology and MBF produces quality alignment and images, that allows researchers to extract quantitative data from whole slide digital images from doing unbiased mechanism for quantifying biological features, or doing medical education, and 3D reconstruction of features of interest.
A streamline process has been created to go for glass slides to whole slide images, which can then be stored, images can then be utilized to get repeatable, reliable, quantitative measures from the images. Researchers can utilize the system to identify individual neuroanatomical regions with automatic registration, or reconstruct 3D image volumes from serial section images.
Tappan explains creating whole slide digital imaging at resolution high enough to get cellular or subcellular detail may be relevant for pathology applications as being able to share image data with colleagues at any point over the internet expands the ability of glass slides to leave the laboratory and be approachable by other colleagues in a process that could expand capabilities to provide big data analyses of large images.
