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Virtual microscopy for education
Guided by annotations and
‘views’, students can identify regions
of interest(ROIs) easily |
Teaching new students to analyse pathology samples is an important process. It is, though, beset with the difficult decision of how best to demonstrate the differences between normal samples and many different disease stages that exist for each type of tissue. Up until now, this choice has been restricted to either giving each student a different, but very similar slide, so that they can get the feel of working with a whole sample, or presenting a single image of one sample via projector or online tutorial. Both of these options have severe limitations for teaching in groups. With the introduction of the Olympus dotSlide system, though, this has now changed.
| Digital teaching in classrooms and remotely
From Olympus’ Net Image Server SQL (NIS SQL) database virtual digital slides can be easily accessed, viewed and annotated simply with an Internet browser or with the free OlyVIA image viewer. Each student can review the same sample and control the position and magnification individually as if it were a real slide. The tutor can also work with all the students in real time, showing them how best to analyse effectively, pick out rare cases, or test all students on the same slide.
Maximise teaching efficiency
Digital SlideBox (SlidePath) is a leading software package that allows academic tutors to build extensive libraries of slides and pathology cases for review by students using the web. Developed with key academic institutes, its design facilitates the creation and editing of educational content, quickly and easily, and is an ideal interactive resource for teaching in any discipline that uses glass slides. Thus, digital microscopy now offers students the opportunity to navigate around a histological section at a variety of magnifications, providing unlimited access to all teaching material outside of the laboratory at any time.
Multimedia e-learning environment
Digital SlideBox’s easy-to-use interface provides users everything needed to produce digital slide-based teaching material via the creation of online histology lab. Innovative features allow the addition of descriptions and questionnaires, as well as multimedia files, such as lecture notes, presentations and videos. Furthermore, the technology allows educators to link to external web resources to maximise existing online content, and provides seamless support for all leading scanner image files. Digital SlideBox also offers simple and powerful tools that provide unparalleled user and content management, which allows classes, courses and assessments to be organised quickly and easily.
Straightforward course assessment tools
Digital SlideBox offers a number of statistical tools and graphical output of assessment results. The Free Hand Annotation tool allows students to draw any shape to annotate irregular objects and Heat Map Tracking (HMT) provides a visual representation of activity on a digital slide by showing the locations on the slide where different magnifications were used. User Morphing is a means of allowing teachers to view student heat maps and any annotations that they have made. This means teachers can provide feedback and review student performances quickly and easily.
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Archiving rare and valuable
