A virtual microscope for academic medical education: the pate project

Area of Science:

• Medical Education Technology
• Digital Pathology
• Histopathology

Background:

• Whole-slide imaging (WSI) is increasingly vital in student teaching for histology and pathology.
• Existing WSI applications often present technical or design limitations.
• There is a need for improved WSI tools tailored to student educational requirements.

Purpose of the Study:

• To survey students' expectations and desired features for WSI applications in diagnostic training.
• To develop a novel WSI application, Pate, informed by student feedback.
• To assess the feasibility of using web technologies for high-performance WSI educational tools.

Main Methods:

• A survey was administered to 216 students to gather data on WSI experiences and preferences.
• The survey included multiple-choice and essay questions focusing on desired and undesired application features.
• An open-source WSI application, Pate, was developed based on the survey's results.

Main Results:

• Students highly valued features such as slide navigation, histological and pathological annotations, and points of interest.
• Prevalent WSI applications identified were Mainzer Histo Maps, Histoweb Tübingen, and Histonet Ulm.
• A discussion forum was identified as a low-priority feature for students.

Conclusions:

• Student feedback strongly indicates a need for feature-rich WSI applications.
• The developed Pate application incorporates desired features and demonstrates the potential of web technologies for WSI.
• Web-based WSI platforms can deliver both high performance and comprehensive functionality for educational purposes.