Testing of Actual Scanner Performance in a High-loaded UNIM Laboratory Environment

Scanners are the main tool in digital pathology. The technical abilities of scanners determine the workflow logic in the pathology laboratory. Its performance can be restricted by the divergence between the scanning time presented by the manufacturer and the actual scanning time. This could lead to critical deviations from the established business processes in a 24/7 laboratory.

Our investigation is focused in exploring the performance of three main models of high-performance scanners available on the Russian market: 3DHistech, Hamamatsu и Leica.

We compared the performance of the scanners on the samples of a given size with the manufacturer's stated specifications and evaluated the speed of the scanners on the reference and routine laboratory material.

We examined 3DHistech Pannoramic 1000, Hamamatsu NanoZoomer s360 and Leica AT2 with default settings and automatic mode. Two sets of glasses were used (glass slide): Group 1 included 120 slides with 15 mm × 15 mm slices, Group 2 included 120 workflow slides.

The average slide scan times in Groups 1 and 2 for the C13220 (156 ± 1.25 s and 117 ± 4.17 s) and Pannoramic 1000 (210 ± 1.64 s and 183 ± 3.78 s) differ statistically significantly (P < 0.0001). Total scanning time including rack reloading was shorter for the workflow slide set group for the modern C13220 and Pannoramic 1000 scanner models.

The scanner specifications provided by manufacturers are not sufficient to evaluate the performance. The guidelines and regulations concerning scanner selection should be consented by the digital pathology community. We suggest discussing criteria for evaluating scanner performance.