Volume 7, Issue 2, July 2012
Dr. King Chung Lee
Consultant Pathologist, St. Paul’s Hospital
Honorary Consultant, Queen Elizabeth Hospital
Background
Virtual microscopy using whole slide scanning has become increasingly popular in quality assurance program, teaching of pathologists and undergraduates and reproducibility studies 1-2. This concept was first extended to electron microscope (EM) about a year ago 3. This is made possible by two discoveries. Firstly, a free software component capable of stitching sequential pictures into a virtual slide that can be read by another free software. Secondly, an EM function capable of capturing up to 500 images covering a specified area automatically. Because of the simplicity acceptable degree of user intervention during the process and unsurpassed advantages over the conventional method, it was quickly adopted in routine renal biopsy diagnostic EM service and become the only routine service virtual microscopy system in Hong Kong. For those who are interested, you can download a sample from http://kvisit.com/SsKKqAQ and view it by Aperio ImageScope software, which was available for free download from the Aperio website, http://www.aperio.com/download-imagescope-viewer.asp
Summary of implementation
In the last year, over 400 renal biopsy cases were handled in our EM laboratory and over 1000 virtual ultrathin sections were generated (average 2.7 sections per case). The average EM time used in capturing is about 50 minutes per section. The average computing time is 40 minutes per section. The virtual ultrathin sections were either directly interpreted by Pathologists or screened and annotated by our EM tec hnologist before passing to Pathologists.