The Daily Scan

All about blogs

So, what’s a “blog”? The term “blog” is short for weblog. A blog is a website which is organized as a series of news items in reverse chronological order. Blogs are often maintained by individuals, but there are also group blogs, and companies are starting to have blogs, too.

• Blog items are said to be “posted” when they are created and displayed on a blog.
• “Blogging” is the activity of posting items to a blog.
• A “blogger” is someone who has a blog, or who posts to blogs.
• The “blogosphere” is collectively the universe of all bloggers, which is expanding rapidly :)

Blog items generally have a "permalink", which is a web URL that will always be valid to display the item. The links between blog items are as valuable as the commentary around them.

Blogs often allow “comments”. A comment may be posted regarding any item by a visitor to the blog, and all posted comments are public. Bloggers can comment on comments, as can other visitors. This enables a nice dialog between the author(s) of the blog and their visitors.

Most blogs support “RSS feeds”. An RSS feed is a file which has a table-of-contents of the most recent items posted on the blog. RSS feeds are displayed by software programs called “feed readers” (or sometimes “aggregators”). A feed reader can “subscribe” to a large number of website simultaneously. At some interval, typically once per hour or so, the feed reader checks each site’s feed to see if anything new has been posted. By using a feed reader it is possible to monitor the contents of a large number of websites very easily. RSS feeds are not just for blogs, a large number of news and feature websites publish feeds as well, such as CNN, the New York Times, CNET, Yahoo, etc. Most likely any websites you monitor for news or information on a daily basis have a feed, and can be easily monitored using a feed reader instead of surfing to the website.

If you’re interested in experimenting with a feed reader, I recommend FeedDemon ($30) or SharpReader (free). There is also a feed reader named NewsGator ($30) which runs as an Outlook plug-in, so you can read website feeds right alongside your email. (For Mac users, I recommend NetNewsWire ($40) or Shrook ($20). These programs all allow a free trial period and are easily uninstalled if you decide you don’t want them.

Even if you’re not a blog aficionado you’ll find feed readers save you a lot of time!

Finally, many blogs support “trackbacks”. A trackback is a notification that another website somewhere has linked to a particular item. Viewing trackbacks allows visitors to follow a “discussion” taking place between several bloggers which are linking back and forth to each other.

Aperio patent issued!

Yippee. Aperio has been awarded U.S. Patent # 6,711,283 for "Fully Automatic Rapid Microscope Slide Scanner".

Quoting from the Abstract:

Apparatus for and method of fully automatic rapid scanning and digitizing of an entire microscope sample, or a substantially large portion of a microscope sample, using a linear array detector synchronized with a positioning stage that is part of a computer controller microscope slide scanner. The invention provides a method for composing the image stripes obtained from successive scans of the sample into a single contiguous digital image. The invention also provides a method for statically displaying sub-regions of this large digital image at different magnifications, together with a reduced magnification macro-image of the entire sample. The invention further provides a method for dynamically displaying, with or without operator interaction, portions of the contiguous digital image. In one preferred embodiment of the inventions, all elements of the scanner are part of a single-enclosure that has a primary connection to the Internet or to a local intranet. In this embodiment, the preferred sample type is a microscope slide and the illumination and imaging optics are consistent with transmission mode optics optimized for diffraction-limited digital imaging.

Whew. For those who are interested, here is the entire Patent (PDF).

We have a bunch of other patents in various stages of processing, but this is the first one which has issued. Yippee.

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!