10 December 2008 – Olympus offers a complete online pathology resource with Digital SlideBox

Hamburg, 10 December 2008: Olympus is now offering the SlidePath Digital SlideBox interactive digital slide application software solution. This comprehensive digital slide multimedia management system allows users to create their own web-based pathology resource in minutes. Furthermore, Digital SlideBox can be used to exploit the power of digital slides in education and training, offering maximum teaching efficiency in all histological applications.

Digital SlideBox is a leading software package that allows academic tutors to build extensive libraries of slides and pathology cases for review by students using the web. Developed with key academic institutes, its design facilitates the creation and editing of educational content, quickly and easily, and is an ideal interactive resource for teaching in any discipline that uses glass slides. Thus, digital microscopy now offers students the opportunity to navigate around a histological section at a variety of magnifications, providing unlimited access to all teaching material outside of the laboratory at anytime.

Digital SlideBox’s easy-to-use interface provides users everything needed to produce digital slide-based teaching material via the creation of online histology lab. Innovative features allow the addition of descriptions and questionnaires, as well as multimedia files, such as lecture notes, presentations and videos. Furthermore, the technology allows educators to link to external web resources to maximise existing online content, and provides seamless support for all leading scanner image files. Digital SlideBox also offers simple and powerful tools that provide unparalleled user and content management, which allows classes, courses and assessments to be organised quickly and easily.

Digital SlideBox offers a number of statistical tools and graphical output of assessment results. The Free Hand Annotation tool allows students to draw any shape to annotate irregular objects and Heat Map Tracking (HMT) provides a visual representation of activity on a digital slide by showing the locations on the slide where different magnifications were used. User Morphing is a means of allowing teachers to view student heat maps and any annotations that they have made. This means teachers can provide feedback and review student performances quickly and easily.