Leeds Virtual Reality Powerwall project wins a large extension

Leeds researchers are applying "Powerwall' technology to create a Virtual Reality (VR) Microscope, which will transform the way that cancer is diagnosed in hospitals. The £590,000 project, funded by the National Institute for Health Research, is a collaboration between the Pathology and Tumour Biology group at Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine and the Visualization and VR group in the University's School of Computing.

Virtual slides are enormous digital images obtained by scanning tissue at high resolution (over 200,000 dots per inch). Their size makes examining them with a conventional monitor tedious and slow, requiring many panning actions to view hundreds of fields of view.

A pilot project in 2007 funded by the Pathological Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and using the prototype Powerwall in Computing funded by JISC/ VizNET, showed that pathologists only needed minimal training to be as efficient using the Powerwall as they are with a conventional light microscope.

This project has now been extended with a 3 year £590k grant from NIHR to develop a virtual microscope that combines VR techniques for real-time rendering of the gigantic virtual slides, with intelligent navigation algorithms that speed up pathologists' diagnoses, and comprehensive evaluations with practicing pathologists.

The aim of this NIHR project is ambitious - to produce a digital microscope which will replace the conventional light microscope in diagnostic work and teaching. Two powerwalls will be installed on site in St James University Hospital to view diagnostic images - to our knowledge the first time that this has been attempted in a working hospital.

Further information can be found on the Virtual Pathology website.