Nikon Instruments Europe will now be distributing on the continent a line of ScanScope slide scanning systems for pathology and histocellular diagnostics and research. According to a press release by Aperio Technologies, Inc., a Vista, Calif. company, distribution will include Aperio’s “award-winning ScanScope slide scanning systems and Spectrum(TM) digital pathology information management software to the clinical market, including hospitals and academic medical centers, within Europe.”
The technology in a nut-shell:
Aperio’s digital pathology systems are based on the company’s patented linear array-based ScanScope slide scanners, which create seamless, true color whole slide images from an entire glass slide in a matter of minutes. Aperio’s slide scanning systems include the ScanScope GL-E configured for education, the ScanScope GL-T configured for telepathology, as well as the 5-slide ScanScope CS and the 120-slide high throughput ScanScope XT. Aperio’s slide scanning systems are offered with Spectrum software to enable the secure viewing, analysis and management of digital slides and other images in multi-user, multi-site environments…
Line scanning is a significant advancement in rapid, high resolution virtual microscopy. ScanScope scanners make it practical — for the first time — to create seamless digital slides of an entire microscope slide with superior image quality and speed.
Image tiling involves the capture of multiple small regions of a microscope slide using a traditional CCD camera. Image tiles are stitched together (aligned) to create a large contiguous digital image (mosaic) of an entire slide. Image tiling systems can take hours to capture and align the thousands of tiles that are required to create a contiguous image.
Line scanning is a superior methodology to image tiling. ScanScope scanners do not use a fixed-area camera to capture thousands of individual image tiles but instead employ linear-array detectors in conjunction with specialized motion control components, a microscope objective lens and customized optics. As a result, ScanScope scanners efficiently capture a small number of contiguous overlapping image stripes. Whereas image tiling is inherently stop-and-go, ScanScope scanners continuously move microscope slides during the acquisition of imagery data. This ability to capture imagery data while the sample is moving is a key reason why line scanning is ideally suited for rapid slide digitization.
Press release…
Aperio’s technology page…
Products page…
(hat tip: MTB Europe)
