Improving the Visualization and Dicomization process for the Stacked Whole Slide Imaging

Because of its high-resolution visibility across bone tissue, digital whole slide imaging (WSI) in pathology has become increasingly popular in biomedicine for diagnostic, educational, and research purposes. The technology, however, is not yet sufficiently mature to support remote clinical practice in pathology. Several technical challenges have hampered the gradual rollout of telematics platforms. Most notably, there is a lack of system interoperability because scanner manufacturers have yet to adopt a standard for data format and communications processes, specifically the DICOM standard, which already supports WSI. At the moment, it is uncommon to find an institutional repository capable of acquiring, storing, and visualizing samples scanned by different vendors’ equipment. Although some vendors offer DICOM interfaces, the vast majority still use proprietary solutions. This article proposes a framework for multi-vendor data integration through the dicomization of proprietary images, including metadata, and optimization of the visualization process, with a focus on the stacked gigapixel WSI produced by new generation scanners. These images are difficult to preprocess and visualize in most environments due to their size, which is typically in the hundreds of Gigabytes range, and there are no reliable packages that can load, preprocess, and visualize these stacked WSI on a single platform. In this work, we created a simple automated pipeline that can read the majority of proprietary WSI images and focal planes, convert them to DICOM for preprocessing and visualization, and make them compatible with modern Web PACS platforms. The solution was tested with eight distinct proprietary files, two of which were stacked images, from acquisition to Web visualization, demonstrating good performance and efficient use of computational resources.