A rich internet application for remote visualization and collaborative annotation of digital slides in histology and cytology

Abstract

SUMMARY:BACKGROUND:Digital slide scanning is advancing the field of pathology and biomedical research, resulting in very large amounts of imaging data. From the computer science point of view, it is challenging to efficiently share, annotate and analyze such data due to their distinct geographical localizations, their high dimensionality, and their numerous sources of variability (scanning equipments, file formats, acquisition protocols, application domains, ...).FINDINGS:We integrated recent web technologies and generic methods to allow remote visualization and collaborative annotation of digital slides through the Internet. Using this tool we were able to build atlases of thousands of annotations related to cell and tissue types in lung cancer studies from two distant research laboratories. Promising cell and tissue recognition results were obtained by integrating a recent content-based image retrieval algorithm.CONCLUSIONS:This work proposes a new web-based tool to ease collaborative projects in digital histology and cytology.