A rich internet application for remote visualization and collaborative annotation of digital slides in histology and cytology

Excerpt

In the field of digital pathology and biomedical research, there is a strong need for efficient tools to build pathology atlases and to foster collaboration between researchers, pathologists (e.g. for inter-observer concordance studies) and computer scientists (e.g. for development and extensive validation of novel computer vision algorithms). Although many efforts have been made in virtual microscopy and telepathology in the recent years [1‐4] , many of the resulting frameworks are not fully web-based therefore limiting collaboration, or they are vendor-dependant therefore limited in terms of supported image formats, or they use proprietary modules that prevent cross-browser compatibility and seamless execution on mobile devices, or they have restricted functionalities (e.g. images can only be annotated manually with image-level tags or fixed markers), or their design limits their application domain (e.g. education only, or disease-specific). In this paper, we present a general-purpose, rich internet application using recent web technologies and integrating various open-source tools, standards and generic algorithms for remote visualization and collaborative annotation of digital slides. …