Greetings! Today we will demystify one of ImageScope's coolest and yet least well-known features. That's right, we're going to talk about annotation links. (dum dum dum)
Did you know? With annotation links you can create an ordered sequence of digital slide regions for later display. Perfect for tumor boards, conferences, many education applications, and even pathologist-to-clinician communications. The linked regions can all be within one slide, or they can span any number of slides.
Pull up a chair, I'm going to give you a couple of examples. In the first example we'll annotate several regions within an H&E slide and link them into an ordered sequence.
Step 1: Launch ImageScope, and open the digital slide (or simply select the slide from within Spectrum). Here's our example slide:
Step 2: Create a few annotation regions. First a rectangle labelled "interesting area", then a free-form region (with the Pen tool) labelled "free-form region of interest", and finally an arrow labelled "wow, this is amazing". This is what the image looks like with the three annotation regions:
Step 3: Link the regions in a sequence. Open the Link Manager with View | Annotation Link Manager or by clicking the
icon on the toolbar, it looks like this:
The three annotations are listed at left. Next create links by dragging and dropping an annotation region on top of another one. First click on "interesting area" and drag it over "free-form region of interest", then drop it. This creates a link from the rectange to the free-form region. Next click on "free-form region of interest" and drag it over "wow, this is amazing", then drop it. This creates a second link from the free-form region to the arrow.
Clicking on each region in the Link Manager displays the links from (blue) and to (red) the region:
That's it! We've created three regions and linked them in a sequence.
To use these links, close the Link Manager and use the Next Link
and Previous Link
icons on the toolbar to move from one annotation region to another.
Okay, that was cool, but do you have time for another example? Now we're going to link four separate digital slides together in a sequence. Ready...set...
Step1: Launch ImageScope, and open the digital slides (or simply select the slides from within Spectrum). Here's our example slides:
Step 2: Link the slides in a sequence. Open the Link Manager with View | Annotation Link Manager or by clicking the
icon on the toolbar, it looks like this:
The four slides are listed at left. Next create links by dragging and dropping a slide on top of another one. Link the first slide to the second, the second to the third, and the third to the fourth.
Clicking on each slide in the Link Manager displays the links from (blue) and to (red) the slide:
That's it! We've linked four slides in a sequence.
To use these links, close the Link Manager and use the Next Link
and Previous Link
icons on the toolbar to move from one slide to another. You will notice this works even if all the slides have not been opened. For example, close all the slides except the first one:
Now click Next Link
on the toolbar and the second slide will be opened and displayed!
Similarly, click Next Link
again and the third slide will be opened and displayed:
And finally click Next Link
once more and the fourth slide will be opened:
Isn't that cool? I thought you'd think so.
In addition to linking regions in one slide together, you can link a region in one slide to another region in a second slide. This is great for preparing a display sequence of regions for presentation in a tumor board. And you can also link regions to entire slides! This is useful for annotating a gross image with links to slides made from tissue blocks cut from it.
Please try this yourself; ImageScope's annotation links are easier to create and use than they are to explain!