VIRTUAL SLIDES IN TISSUE - BASED DIAGNOSIS - A REVIEW* DIJAGNOSTI^KA TELEPATOLOGIJA - REVIJSKI PRIKAZ*

Virtual slides (VS) or digitized whole histological images (WHI) are digital images that are completely acquired from histological glass slides. They can be considered as basic elements of a new performance in tissue – based diagnosis or diagnostic surgical pathology which is called digital pathology. From the mathematical point of view the world of digital pathology includes several matrices with different meanings, such as VS itself, virtual immunohistochemistry, syntactic structure analysis, digital data obtained from molecular pathology investigations (virtual molecular biology), virtual clinical data stored in a hospital information system (HIS)), and data for quality evaluation (statistical information). These different tools interact by appropriate surfaces, which are usually regulated and controlled by internet standards. Historically, digital pathology has its roots in visual electronic communication of diagnostic pathology (telepathology). At present, telepathology has been embedded in specific forums if it is used for expert consultation, or is bound to virtual microscopy (specific VS viewers) if applied for frozen section services. A virtual microscope has to be equipped with different features if it will be used interactively, i.e., by human control, or in an automated manner. The viewers and their included tools play a significant role for diagnosis purposes. They are still in an experimental phase because VS have only rarely been used for routine diagnostic purposes until today. It can be expected that additional tools (diagnosis assistants) such as automated selection of regions of interest (ROI), automated artificial coloring of VS, and automated selection of diagnosis – dependent additional tissue examinations (essential immunostains to confirm/redef ine a proposed diagnosis) will be commercially available in the near future. The significance of content based image analysis to automatically derive a diagnosis from VS is discussed as well as the implementation of content - based image information algorithms to be applied for predictive tissue – based diagnoses and image/case retrieval.

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