Virtual Microscopy in Medical Images: a Survey

A major objective of the present survey is to provide a comprehensive vision of the most recent methods for the construction of a Virtual Microscopy Viewer (VMV). The Virtual Microscopy (VM) is the microscopy area that provides a realistic digital emulation of a conventional light microscope and the VMV is the software tool that provides such emulation. Construction of a mega-image by stitching a sequential set of microscopic fields of view (FOV) is the first step towards a useful VMV development. Once the mega-image is assembled, this huge amount of generated data should be compressed and stored in hard disk for later recovery. Finally, whether this mega-image is compressed or not, data should be suitably accessed for navigation. The reviewed approaches are herein classified according to their role in VM, that is to say, at the stitching, storage and navigation phases. Main contributions, advantages, and drawbacks of the current navigation methods are presented and discussed, as well the outlook for future research.