Digital Pathology is First to Develop Rapid Oil-immersion Slide Scanner

Aperio Technologies Inc., a provider of digital pathology systems and services to the healthcare and life science industry has introduced a high-resolution slide scanning capability that provides haematopathologists and microbiologists the ability to digitize blood smear, Gram stain and other microscopic specimens requiring oil-immersion resolutions.

"Aperio created the digital pathology market some years ago with the world's first ultra-fast slide scanner," said Dirk Soenksen, CEO of Aperio. "At that time we achieved scanning resolutions that were well-suited to histology specimens such as tissue biopsies and frozen sections. Image quality and resolutions have continued to increased somewhat in the last few years, but until now have never been high enough for blood smear, Gram stains and other specimens that are visualized under a microscope using high numerical aperture oil-immersion objective lenses."

Aperio has recently begun to offer oil-immersion slide scanning as part of its slide-scanning service. The company has developed a dedicated slide scanner as part of its ScanScope series that has been optimized for the use of oil-immersion objective lenses. The new slide scanner was exhibited at the American Society for Haematology (ASH) meeting held in Orlando, Florida from Dec 9-12. In addition, Aperio has added an oil-immersion upgrade option to its ScanScope CS offering.

"The image quality of the blood smears scanned by Aperio is quite remarkable," stated Dr. James Thompson, president of Pathogenesys. "The oil-immersion slide scanning system captures virtually the same level of detail that I can visualize under a microscope when I use oil immersion optics. The motion control challenges of scanning a microscope slide at spatial resolutions that are a fraction of the wavelength of light are formidable, as are the complexities associated with managing the use of immersion oil in an automated mechanical system," explained Greg Crandall, vice president of engineering at Aperio. "Our engineers and scientists have successfully advanced our patented line-scanning technology to create high quality digital slides using oil-immersion objective lenses at unprecedented resolutions."

"The ability to address the digital pathology needs of haematopathologists and microbiologists opens up new markets for Aperio," commented Soenksen. "We're proud of the leadership and innovation that we bring to this emerging market."