Slides & Viewing
Step 2 – Slides & Viewing: opening and exploring your digital slides
Section titled “Step 2 – Slides & Viewing: opening and exploring your digital slides”In this step you work directly with the digital slides themselves. You open whole-slide images in a viewer, zoom and pan around, and perform quick sanity checks: is this the right case, the right stain, and a reasonably good scan? You are not yet doing heavy analysis, just making sure you understand what you are looking at.
Technical name: Slides & Viewing
What this is
Section titled “What this is”Working with the slides themselves:
- Open WSIs; zoom and pan like on a scanner viewer.
- Compare slides side‑by‑side or across time.
Typical questions
Section titled “Typical questions”- “Does this viewer feel like my scanner at work?”
- “Can I quickly show this slide to a trainee or in tumor board?”
- “Can I share a link instead of emailing a massive file?”
Common tasks
Section titled “Common tasks”- View SVS/NDPI/other formats.
- Take screenshots at specific magnifications.
- Move from paper sign‑out to digital sign‑out for teaching.
Core tools (examples)
Section titled “Core tools (examples)”- QuPath — open slides, annotate, basic analysis.
- Vendor viewers — Aperio, Hamamatsu, Leica; used in many hospitals.
- OpenSlide — library behind the scenes for reading WSIs.
- OpenSeadragon — Google‑Maps‑like web viewer. See /tools/openseadragon/
- OMERO / OHIF — server‑based systems for managing images and users.
Clinician mental model
Section titled “Clinician mental model”These are your digital microscopes and virtual multi‑head scopes—on desktop or in the browser.
Ready-to-use code
Section titled “Ready-to-use code”- VIEW-01: Digital microscope blocks — open WSIs with OpenSlide (thumbnails + high-power regions) and run quick patch grids with Pillow/Matplotlib to visually QC datasets.