Patent ID: 8582924

Claim:
A method of storing a digital image acquired by a computer-controlled digitizing microscope, comprising: partitioning a microscopic image into a matrix of zelles, wherein each zelle comprises a discrete portion of the microscopic image and each zelle includes a plurality of pixels of the microscopic image; for each zelle, capturing attribute data descriptive of an associated zelle and capturing image data descriptive of a discrete portion of the microscopic image contained in the associated zelle; for each zelle, determining whether said zelle contains specimen content therein; classifying each zelle either partially or fully including specimen content therein as having information of interest and classifying each zelle not including any specimen content therein as not having information of interest; compressing the image data; storing the attribute data in a zelle database comprised of at least one zelle database file, each zelle database file being associated with at least one corresponding zelle; and storing the compressed image data in an image database comprised of at least one image file, wherein each image file is associated with a corresponding zelle database file.