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Virtual slide viewer powered by the Google Maps API

A screenshot of the slide viewer in action.

A team at the NYU School of Medicine’s Division of Educational Informatics has created a brilliant implementation of a virtual slide viewer using the Google Maps API. They are using their viewer to view digital slides acquired using Bacus and Aperio slide scanners.  In my opinion, this is superior in some ways to the viewers I’ve used from commercial vendors. Check out the NYU system here.

As a side note:  One concern I have about existing whole slide imaging technologies is the proprietary nature of the associated software platforms, and the resulting reliance on a certain vendor’s product for access to archival materials.  At present, Bacus / Olympus and Aperio make their viewing software, but not their source code, freely available for download (though Aperio is a contributor to open-source initiatives, e.g. their contributions to the libtiff project, which I applaud). As far as I know, industry standards for whole slide imaging are still evolving, particularly with regard to their relationship to new and existing software patents. I am hoping we can look forward to a totally transparent and open standard–one that will encourage innovation and, in the long run, result in better technologies and better patient care.

Thanks for posting this. We undertook building this precisely because the viewers offered by the vendors were not extensible and didn’t have features our faculty were requesting.

We have setup a Google Code project site http://code.google.com/p/virtualmicroscope/ so that anyone can easily set up and localize a virtual slide viewer with minimal effort. On this site we’ve posted a Python script which takes Aperio images tiles them into a format usable with the Google Maps API and a sample barebones html viewer to get things started. Feedback, questions or development contributions are more than welcome.

Regards,
Bill

I am really impressed by this use of virtual slides in Google Maps. It’s absolutely brilliant!

We have also struggled to incorporate virtual slides into our web applications using the software of other vendors. The cost is high and the usability is not very good.

Thank you so much for making the code open source. I can’t wait to start incorporating Google Maps API into our apps!