6th ESACP Congress, Heidelberg, April 7-11, 1999

A090
AN INTERNET BASED MICROSCOPE SLIDE BROWSER FOR QA AND TRAINING PURPOSES
Lambrou C, Hayes-Gill, Ellis IO, Crowe JA, Pinder S, Pearson D

The correct histopathological analysis of breast tissue is vital for both accurate diagnosis and treatment. In order to ensure consistent diagnosis, sample cases are circulated amongst practising pathologists, and their collective diagnoses are compared for discrepancies. This process has problems - Firstly, it takes months rather than weeks for an entire set of slides to be assessed by every pathologist. Secondly, several slides are prepared from each sample tumour, so that different groups of pathologists may be viewing slightly different sets of slides. In order to speed up the QA process, and to ensure that every pathologist assesses the same set of samples, we are currently working on a 'virtual microscope' application (VM) which can be accessed by all the pathologists simultaneously from a central server. The VM is a Java-based application that can be accessed by any pathologist through a standard web-browser. It provides a client area in which the user can view a histological specimen in a manner similar to using a microscope - including the ability to pan around an image, and to move to higher and lower magnifications. As a general purpose tool for viewing pre-captured histological samples, the VM is also be used as part of a web-based training package for trainee pathologists.