Images may need to be 'cleaned' for example when an image has been damaged prior to scanning, or includes foreign bodies such as dust or hairs. The cleaning of a slide involves the use of various media art packages such as PaintShop Pro or PhotoShop. For example, what appears to be a small speck of dust may in fact be a cancer cell. The original Biomed Web service was one of the earliest Web-enabled image archives. After some initial experiments with the freely available PostgreSQL relational database system, the project decided instead to make use of the Roads toolkit.
Roads is a free database, search and indexing system designed initially for Web cataloguing.
With some local amendments, Roads has proved useful for managing the cataloguing aspects of the image archive. An amended copy of Roads currently provides the service. This is used both for cataloguing and to provide end-user search services. UMLS provides a very high and machine-processable amount of information about each image. Additional effort to support these developments has been made available through collaboration with the ILRT's work on the Desire project.