Virtual Microscope Diminishes Gap Between Microscopy and Imaging

Careful integration of all components of a virtual microscope creates a highly flexible system that enables the user to acquire digital slides quickly and effortlessly.

The microscope's slide scanning system can scan from 1 to 100 slides at very high fidelity, allowing users anywhere on the globe to view and fully navigate high-resolution images of entire slides or areas of slides.

The VS110 system from Olympus (Center Valley, PA, USA) brings microscopy and imaging closer together. The result is an advanced and extremely versatile virtual slide, which is a high-resolution image of the whole specimen. This can be viewed from the overview image at low magnification up to maximum magnification via seamless zoom.

Additionally the entire specimen can be acquired in different focal planes, so that one can focus through the sample virtually at a later time to obtain depth information on the sample. Stored electronically on a central server, samples can be viewed around the world instantly and simultaneously.

Two awards were given to Olympus at the first European Scanner Contest, which took place in late May in Berlin (Germany). The Olympus VS110 virtual microscopy system competed among a field of five slide scanner systems and earned two of the three top honors in the quality category--scanning slides of a wide variety of specimens at 20x and 40x (0.16 µm). To earn each of the awards, the system had to image accurately three diagnostically relevant regions of interest (ROI) on ten different slides.

The instruments in the competition were used to evaluate the slides, each prepared by an independent institution, and each of different tissue types (skin, breast, kidney, etc.) and staining methods (for example, hematoxylin and eosin stain—H&E—and the toluidine blue stain).

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Olympus
Olympus VS110 system