The last week Toledo hosted the biennial 9th European Congress on Telepathology and 3rd International Congress on Virtual Microscopy, thanks to the excellent organization of Marcial Garcia Rojo (Hospital General de Ciudad Real, Spain), Gloria Bueno Garc�a (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain) and Jose Sagristan and colleagues (Health Care Service of Castilla-La Mancha, SESCAM, Spain).

Open source appeared explicitly in one round table, entitled “Open Source in Pathology”, and including two presentations. On that occasion, Jose Sagristan discussed the open source components of a large project called Serendipia. He described the Centre for Innovation in Open Source for Healthcare (CISOS) created in 2005 by the regional healthcare service of Castilla-La Mancha (SESCAM), and the enterprise application integrator HIGEIA they used inside the Serendipia project.

Vincenzo Della Mea (me) gave a review of open source tools available for use in Pathology (cited links are collected here).

However, open source did its part, less loudly, in different other presentations. Klaus Dietmar Kunze (University of Dresden, Germany) and Chhut Serey Vathana (Phnom Penh Inst. of Pathology, Viet Nam) reported results obtained using the same iPath telepathology web application for second opinion consultation; some screenshot from iPath also appeared in other presentations.

Jorma Isola (U. of Tampere, Finland), co-author of the LargeMontage ImageJ plugin, described a novel plugin his group recently developed (FishJ).

Finally, a poster described the eSlide suite for digital slide acquisition and visualization, developed at my Lab.

Open Source is doing working its way into Pathology, although the main pathologist’ tool, i.e., the microscope, is of course hardware…