Hello, World

Welcome world to The Daily Scan.

I'm Ole Eichhorn, the CTO of Aperio Technologies. We're a small biotech company in San Diego, California, that makes Virtual Microscopy systems for automating Pathology.

This is our blog, a place where we can communicate with you regarding daily news about the company, Virtual Microscopy, and the Pathology industry. Please visit often, we hope you find it worthwhile. We also have an RSS feed so you can subscribe using your favorite RSS reader. And yes, I will be reading the comments, so please feel free to interact!

So Aperio makes "Virtual Microscopy systems". What does that mean?

Well, first we make a product called the ScanScope, which is a high resolution scanner for microscope slides. A ScanScope scans microscope slides and creates virtual slides, which are large image files than enable rapid zooming and panning. ScanScopes typically scan at .5 microns / pixel. A typical microscopy slide has about 2 inches x 1 inch of tissue, so the scanned image is about 100,000 x 50,000 pixels. That's about 15GB of information in one image! We compress the data with JPEG2000 at about 20:1, so the resulting files would be about 800MB.

You can see a gallery of virtual slides on our scanscope.com website.

Next, we build software for managing virtual slides. We have a cool viewer called ImageScope which lets you easily pan and zoom virtual slides. We also make a product called ImageServer which efficiently serves virtual slide image data. The combination of ImageServer and ImageScope enables remote viewing of virtual slides, or telepathology. We also make a product called Virtual Slide Conferencing, which lets multiple Pathologists view the same images at the same time, all in one synchronized conferencing session.

Finally, we build software for analyzing virtual slides. Pathologists spend a great deal of time "reading" slides, looking for needles in haystacks. Our software helps them diagnose cases by quantitating assays and performing automated pattern recognition.

Thanks for visiting, and please don't hesitate to email me with your feedback!