Virtual Slide System Digitizes Slides at High Magnification

A system has been released that can rapidly scan a slide in less than two minutes, creating a digital virtual slide (VS) that is an exact copy of the original.

The duplicate of the original is easily created and navigated using an intuitive graphical interface and the system is extremely fast, scanning a 15 × 15 mm area using a 20 × objective lens with a pixel resolution of 0.345 µm in around 90 seconds.

The VS120 Virtual Slide System (Olympus Europa; Hamburg, Germany) enhances and preserves sample detail via the high quality Olympus UIS2 optics and custom camera algorithms. A threshold-based method is used to remove small particles, and the new Sample Detection Mask improves image quality by maintaining accurate focus when using automatic settings. To facilitate high-throughput scale-up, Olympus provides the optional VS120-L5, which can scan up to five slides automatically. For larger collections, the VS120-L100 provides “walk away” scanning of up to 100 slides, while an inbuilt barcode scanner ensures that all slides are accurately tracked and cataloged.

The VS120 images can be captured regardless of the illumination technique, including brightfield, phase contrast, and multichannel fluorescence via the additional fluorescence extension module. The new high-resolution camera has three predefined brightfield settings that simplify and optimize the scanning of normal, dark, or faintly stained samples. The virtual slides created can be navigated digitally in real-time, without the need for an instrument or even the sample. The VS120 is perfect for teleconsultation during disease diagnosis, global research collaboration, the archiving of slide materials and for sharing data with the classroom when teaching.

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Olympus Europa