Creation of a fully digital pathology slide archive by high-volume tissue slide scanning

Digital slide scanners for scanning glass slides are becoming increasingly popular because current scanners are fast enough and produce good enough images for diagnostic purposes, education, and research. Also, the price for storing vast amounts of data has decreased over the last years, and this trend is expected to continue. Where most laboratories use their scanners mainly for education and research with limited financial and technical implications, we decided to face the huge challenges of prospectively setting up a fully digital pathology slide archive, primarily aiming to optimize the preparation and running of clinicopathological conferences. In this article, we describe the setup of our digital archiving solution and discuss the technical challenges we had to overcome. To give insight in the performance of our digital archive, we provide some statistics as well. We also present our thoughts on future developments in the area of digital slide scanning.