"Virtual slides an educational boon"

Common computers are morphing into powerful microscopes at UQ as the University trials virtual microscopes and unveils a plan to build a national repository of virtual veterinary slides.

Virtual microscopes, created by UQ's Schools of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) and Veterinary Science, are computers with special software that do the job of high-end laboratory microscopes.

Project leader and UQ Vet School senior lecturer Dr Paul Mills said virtual microscopes were accurate and users could zoom in or out, view depths of field, label their slides and rotate them like a three-dimensional image. ...

[ITEE senior lecturer Dr Andrew Bradley] said the camera and software took thousands of high resolution images which were stitched together into a single jpeg 2000 image of the whole slide.

Even though the stored image was big, between one and two gigabytes compared to normal digital images of a few megabytes, the software only used a portion of the total image at one time. ...