Visualization Montages of acquired microscope images have been generated before, but there has not previously been a way to easily transmit and view these images over a network, due to their extremely large file size and network bandwidth limitations. Our virtual slide viewer developed for use with the virtual slide database is interactive and permits the rapid display of any portion of the acquired images at any magnification. The viewer enables users to zoom into designated areas and navigate through the virtual slide with the functionality familiar to a microscopist. The interface is platform independent, thus allowing PC, Mac, Linux, Unix, etc. Successful visualization of a virtual slide depends on high-performance viewing technology.
Users can interactively zoom in and out and view any area of the image at any resolution.
Once the user chooses to zoom in, the image server sends only the new region of interest at a higher resolution. The more the user zooms in, the higher the resolution of the image that is sent, to the limit defined by the microscope lens used to acquire the data. The virtual slide allows for a small amount of additional dynamic zoom capacity by using pixel enlargement, allowing for a greater magnification than achieved by the light microscope. The requirements for viewing virtual slides are far less than those for acquiring and storing them, due to the interactive streaming nature of the viewer, which downloads only the user-selected regions of the slide at highest resolution. For viewing virtual slides, we recommend a 500 MHz processor, with 128 MB of RAM, operating on Windows 95 or higher.