pathology

New technique uses virtual slides to view tissue in 3D

Today, pathologists and researchers must cut super-thin slices of tissue samples to view them on a microscope -- a labor-intensive process that renders 3D images created from hundreds of 2D sections prohibitively expensive.

Not to mention tedious to construct. Imagine if a single scene in Halo was presented as a series of 2D images one must perfectly align before getting the lay of, say, a single battleground.

Now, computer scientists and medical researchers at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom say they've devised a novel workaround in the form of a digital scanning system that produces 3D views of tissue samplesRead more

First 1 trillion-pixel image

Medical imaging specialists Aperio have broken the 4GB file size limit on the TIFF image format by creating their own format called BigTIFF and offering the format into the public domain (an amazing fact in its own right). To showcase the power of BigTIFF image resolution, Aperio has released the first terapixel image. The image shows 225 pathology slides of breast tissue and can be viewed and explored online (it looks surprisingly like a pink version of Google Earth once you start zooming in).

The image's actual file size as a compressed BigTIFF is 143GB, so don't expect … Read more