Scanning microscope: Please find technical details in the published article.
As can be seen from the picture, the motorized stage holds 8 slides. The
workstation controlling the microscope and acquisition is the right one, while the
left computer processes the image data. The digital camera is connected with
fiber-optics to the workstation. The scanning and the processing workstations
communicate through a standard 100 Mbit ethernet connection.

Workstations: The computer that controls the motorized microscope is a
standard 2 GHz Microsoft Windows workstation. The processing computer is
a 2.6 GHz Microsoft Windows workstation.

Pixel size and resolution limit: A pixel size of 0.26 um corresponds to more
than 90 000 dpi. Even this is however not the highest possible digitization
resolution. With our microscope settings the laws of optics postulate that the
maximum resolution with a NA (Numerical Aperture) of 1.3 is < 0.10 um. This
would provide even more details in the virtual slides, but would also result in
a more than four-fold increase in scanned image data amount. As described
in the published article, the 0.26 um resolution was considered satisfactory
by most pathologists.

Objectives and autofocusing: As discussed in the article, slide scanning with
a 10x or 20x objective would have resulted in much fewer image tiles and
autofocusing  operations during image capture, but the resulting image quality
was disappointing. The main reason for this is that with a 10x or 20x objective,
the area of the view field is much larger, resulting in bad autofocusing due to
always present height variations in the slides. Also, the subjective visual image
quality when scanning with the oil-40x objective was clearly superior. We intend
to publish test series of the same slide scanned with different objectives and
camera settings.

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