Building a Digital Pathology Ecosystem for Education and Research

Successful roll-out of digital histopathology requires more than a whole slide scanner. At Brussels Free University (VUB), we currently have two main use cases for whole slide imaging: education and biobanking. Both are presented to various end-users through customized user interfaces. With the help of the Pathomation software platform for digital microscopy, these integrate various datastores and image repositories, where possible. Custom coding is used to interact with various vendor-software and server applications, where needed, and always with the goal of minimal data duplication in mind. The end-result is an interconnected network of heterogeneous information silos, and a thriving environment for multi-disciplinary and integrated (both brightfield and fluorescent) virtual microscopy. A subset of applications are available to the public via http://www.diabetesbiobank.org.