The Virtual Slide Set - a curriculum development system for digital microscopy

We describe the development of a Virtual Slide System for creating and viewing clinico-pathologic cases with embedded interactive digital microscopy. The system supports rich text-to-image annotation, including (1) hotlinks of text descriptions that move the student to the correct part of the slide, and (2) annotations such as arrows and circles that appear on the Virtual Slide on request. The interface can be configured by the student to alter the degree of guidance the system provides. The authoring layer provides a graphical user interface to authors for creating new case sets, cases, questions, and annotated virtual slides, which are saved to a database and automatically added to the Virtual Slide homepage. The system has been used in two pilot studies at the University of Pittsburgh.