Revisiting JPEG2000 for Efficient and Adaptable Virtual Microscopy

Digital pathology is still far from actual clinic applications, among others because the dominant Whole Slide Image (WSI) format structures information as a pyramid of the WSI at different resolutions. Both the construction of the pyramid and its navigation are relatively inefficient in terms of the required needs of actual cloud applications with many users interacting. This paper presents a novel strategy that boosts the intrinsic advantages of the JPEG2000 format with real pathology cases, making it possible natural JPEG2000 integration with existing WSI viewers. Unlike traditional methods that rely on pyramidal image representations, the proposed approach eliminates the dependency on such intermediary structures, highly improving the digital pathology workflow. Experimental results demonstrate a substantial reduction of 86% in storage space while server-client data exchange is improved in a 30% when comparing with the traditional pyramidal approach.