A soft-cache strategy for pathologist's navigation in virtual microscopy

Navigation through large microscopical images demands special characteristics like flexibility to access image data and progressive recovery or relevant information, i.e., several qualities, magnifications, and random accesses to any desired Window of Interest in the Virtual Slide (VS). Nowadays there exist systems that allow such interaction, but with a certain delay, which is dependent on the application. It has been shown that caching or prefetching policies can speed up interaction with these systems. This article presents an optimal soft-cache strategy, which improves the navigation times in virtual microscopy. The entire method includes an optimal soft-cache strategy and a dynamical probabilistic model of a pathologist's navigation. This strategy was implemented as a Client-Server application, using the JPEG2000-JPIP standard and evaluated using different navigation patterns, namely, four different pathologists exploring 10 VS, stained with different dyes. The present approach was compared with a conventional soft-cache method and the cache performance improved, in average, in about a 10%.