While many areas of the medical field have transitioned to digital imaging, pathology still largely uses glass slides due to the challenges of image acquisition and interpretation. Kitware, in collaboration with Harvard Medical School, is developing an open-source, cross-platform application for processing slide image data. By facilitating digital pathology, data can be readily integrated with other digital records, from specific imaging studies to general electronic health records.

Two of the challenges facing the adoption of digital pathology tools are the difficulty of acquisition and long-term storage. Acquiring digital pathology data is time-intensive and often requires pathologists to supervise the entire acquisition process, which we address through remote monitoring and control of slide acquisition. Additionally, digital slides do not currently provide simple tools for annotating or marking slides, a critical component to analyzing and understanding the sample. With this open-source application, pathologists will be able to easily annotate the slides, make notes, and share and work collaboratively with other pathologists simultaneously on the data.

Kitware is proud to host several significant datasets that are available for interactive viewing, including 15 lectures on digital pathology, a one Tera pixel 2D neuroscience dataset, and a giga voxel dataset.