Homebrew Telepathology (can not get any cheaper)

Well  Telepathology seems to be a rather hot topic these days. It seems that everybody is talking about it, being exited about and yet nobody is using it, except may be the American board of Pathology just to torture the residents. In this article I will show you how to build your own homebrew Telepathology very cheap.

Read bellow....

Before we begin even talking about telepathology there are few question you need to answer first:

1. Do you really need Telepathology ?
A: well if you are in a small private department which prefers to send most of the difficult cases out for consult, the answer will be NO.  Second if your age is over 60 ( no offense) you will not need telepathlogy. Actually most people over the age of 60 who still practice would rather not use modern technologies, you know stick to basics, take it slow and do not alter your established routines...

2. What kind of Telepathology you need:
A: Most of the available technologies use a robotic microscope which can be operated from a distance. Its all good and expensive however the frozen section will no cut themselves and the slides will not jump on the stage. You will need a person on the other end to this. So we can use that person (resident, fellow or PA) to move the slide for us, no need for a robot to do that.

3. How much are you willing to spare:
A: Ha now we are talking right ? This seems to be the greatest problem. Every single time I bring this question during a conversation the common answer will be :"Our institution has no money". To me it seems that most of the hospitals do  not have a $1mln to spare for a Telepathology. Even if they do it will take years for a project like this to get agreed, approved, signed, funded, purchased and finally installed and tested. Finally no body will used it...you know..not to break it...its a million dollar system you know. But at least you can put it on your webpage that you have it.

Building the Telepathology system:

Parts:

A. Camera.
Ebay is your main source for stuff like this. There are gazillion of cameras out there, however I choose to work a particullar one after some research. I searched Ebay for a microscope eyepiece camera which is also a webcam. Try this search..here or you can try this one. As you see there is an abundance of cameras however I was looking for one that is above 1.3Mpx. Actually the price will vary with prices from a $100 for a 1.3Mp up to $400 for a 9.5Mpx camera. For this review I will be using a microscope eyepiece camera of 9.5Mpx for $450 which I payed with my own money.

 This what the camera looks like out of the box. It does come with various adapters for a different eyepieces.

If you have a multihead microscope like in this case you can use the opposite eyepieces for the camera. It is a bit inconvenient if you have another person to sign out cases with you.

.....so with a lite adapting you can actually  put it on top and save the opposite eyepiece.

SOFTWARE OVERVIEW:

The soft ware wich comes with the camera is called ScopePhoto and comes for free with it own drivers. The camera functions as Twain driver so it can be accessed from different applications like Adobe Photoshop for example to acquire images directly. The images can be acquired in 2 ways. One is to capture the currant frame the second one is to capture still images. The problem with the first approach is the camera streams with approximately 30 fps if at at 1mpx resolution which provides good speed but its not good for capturing images. This resolutions is good to stream images to a multimedia projector in case you show live slides. The software provides full screen view, tools to measure distances and angles, labeling and basic image editing like levels, brightness and contrast etc..etc. Overall the software provides everything you need to work with still images. Edited images can be saved in variety of formats like png, jpg, tiff etc. Capturing movies is also a very good option especially if you want to save your live slide lectures.

So to use the camera for live slides you need:

1. Camera -- $450 for a 9.5mpx.
2. Computer ( usually provided by the institution for the tumor board) but if you don't have one a single laptop will do- $600
3. Multimedia projector ( usually provided by the institution for viewing radiology images) - $800.
5. Trinocular microscope- you can get one from Ebay for about $300 like this one.

Total: $2150. This is the actual price for the institution.

Test files: test.zip contains 3 images: 10x is 1.3mpx, the rest are at 9.5mpx. Files are in tiff with total size of 40mb. It will give you an idea about the quality of the images. Click save as...

VIDEO CONFERENCING:

Since the camera is a webcam videoconferencing is possible using Skype which is one-on-one with hidef video at 640:480px video ( you have to change the confing.xml file for that to work). Also it is possible to stream live video feeds (live slides) using services like Junstin.tv or Ustream. Since the feeds are Flash based one day they can be viewed with any cell phone. Thus rapid pathology consultation soon can be done over the phone with live feed.

I hope you enjoy this article and will be more that happy to hear your opinion.