Development of a viewing system for a whole tissue from multiple tissue blocks

Abstract

Viewing whole tissue allows us to recognize spatial perspective, which cannot be seen from a single glass slide and could leads to discovery of novel morphologic and growth patterns of human tumors. However, we cannot observe the whole histological image with large tissue organ. Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) can digitize the entire tissue on a glass slide. If we can use the digital images of multiple tissue blocks, it enables to view whole organ. In addition, this method can keep general versatility as conventional WSI scanners are used. Therefore, we propose a system to view a whole large tissue from multiple tissue blocks.First, in this system, whole organ is sectioned into blocks and H&E slides are scanned by WSI scanners. Then, low‐resolution images are used to export location information (Fig. 1). In the viewer, higher magnification images of the region specified by a user are displayed on a monitor using exported information (Fig. 2).To show the validity of the proposed system, we developed the viewer and confirmed that a whole organ can be observed efficiently. This system can makes it easier to compare to other modality images such as gross pictures of a whole organ. Furthermore, if we expand this system to sections in depth, it would allow us to compare with MRI or other medical imaging techniques. This system would be helpful for clinicopathological‐imaging correlations and better understanding of pathological processes.