9 comments

  • yread 8 minutes ago
    You could probably do it completely clientside. I have a parser for 12 scanner formats in js. It doesnt read the pixels, just parses metadata but jpeg is easy and most common anyway
  • matthberg 5 hours ago
    Seems very similar to how maps work on the web these days, in particular protomap files [0]. I wonder if you could view the medical images in leaflet or another frontend map library with the addition of a shim layer? Cool work!

    0: https://protomaps.com/

    • el_pa_b 4 hours ago
      Thanks! Indeed, digital pathology, satellite imaging and geospatial data share a lot of computational problems: efficient storage, fast spatial retrieval/indexing. I think this could be doable.

      As for digital pathology, the field is very much tied to scanner-vendor proprietary formats (SVS, NDPI, MRXS, etc).

  • rwmj 3 hours ago
    https://dicom.nema.org/dicom/dicomwsi/

    Interesting guide to the Whole Slide Images (WSI) format. The surprising thing for me is that compression is used, and they note does not affect use in diagnostics.

    Back in the day we used TIFF for a similar application (X-ray detector images).

    • yread 13 minutes ago
      Digital pathology are just a lot bigger than radiology, we regularly see slides 500k x 500k pixels.
  • tokyovigilante 3 hours ago
    This is really a job for JPEG-XL, which supports decode of portions of larger images and has recently been added to the DICOM standard.
    • dmd 2 hours ago
      Or IIIF.
  • invaderJ1m 1 hour ago
    How does this compare to things like COGs (Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs) or other binary blob + index raster pyramid formats?

    Was there a requirement to work with these formats directly without converting?

  • lametti 4 hours ago
    Interesting - I'm not so familiar with S3 but I wonder if this would work for WSI stored on-premises. Imposing lower network requirememts and a lightweight web viewer is very advantageous in this use case. I'll have to try it out!
    • el_pa_b 4 hours ago
      When WSI are stored on-premise, they are typically stored on hard drives with a filesystem. If you have a filesystem, you can use OpenSlide, and use a viewer like OpenSeaDragon to visualize the slide.

      WSIStreamer is relevant for storage systems without a filesystem. In this case, OpenSlide cannot work (it needs to seek and open the file).

  • andrewstuart 44 minutes ago
    Please don’t use AWS S3 there’s vast numbers of much cheaper compatible choices.
    • thenaturalist 38 minutes ago
      Pretty bold half claim while not backing it up with a single data point. :D
  • Nora23 3 hours ago
    How does this handle images with different compression formats?
  • tonyhart7 4 hours ago
    hey, I need this