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. 2013 Sep 27:4:27.
doi: 10.4103/2153-3539.119005. eCollection 2013.

OpenSlide: A vendor-neutral software foundation for digital pathology

Adam Goode  1 , Benjamin Gilbert, Jan Harkes, Drazen Jukic, Mahadev Satyanarayanan
Affiliations

OpenSlide: A vendor-neutral software foundation for digital pathology

Adam Goode et al. J Pathol Inform. .

Abstract

Although widely touted as a replacement for glass slides and microscopes in pathology, digital slides present major challenges in data storage, transmission, processing and interoperability. Since no universal data format is in widespread use for these images today, each vendor defines its own proprietary data formats, analysis tools, viewers and software libraries. This creates issues not only for pathologists, but also for interoperability. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of OpenSlide, a vendor-neutral C library for reading and manipulating digital slides of diverse vendor formats. The library is extensible and easily interfaced to various programming languages. An application written to the OpenSlide interface can transparently handle multiple vendor formats. OpenSlide is in use today by many academic and industrial organizations world-wide, including many research sites in the United States that are funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Keywords: Diamond; OpenDiamond; PathFind; digital imaging and communications in medicine; digital slide; scanner; whole-slide image.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Internet viewer for digital slides
Figure 2
Figure 2
PathFind screenshot with search results
Figure 3
Figure 3
How OpenSlide is used by PathFind
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. Huston L, Sukthankar R, Wickremesinghe R, Satyanarayanan M, Ganger GR, Riedel E, et al. San Francisco, CA: 2004. Diamond: A Storage Architecture for Early Discard in Interactive Search, in 3rd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies.
    1. Satyanarayanan M, Sukthankar R, Goode A, Bila N, Mummert L, Harkes J, et al. Searching complex data without an index. Int J Next-Gener Comput. 2010;1:146–67.
    1. Singh R, Chubb L, Pantanowitz L, Parwani A. Standardization in digital pathology: Supplement 145 of the DICOM standards. J Pathol Inform. 2011;2:23. - PMC - PubMed
    1. DICOM Standards Committee Working Group 26. Rosslyn, VA: 2010. Supplement 145: Whole slide microscopic image IOD and SOP classes.
    1. DICOM Standards Committee Working Group 13. Rosslyn, VA: 1999. Supplement 15: Visible light image for endoscopy, microscopy, and photography.

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