Introducing a new universal WSI viewer

[Yves Sucaet]

Dear OpenSliders:

As a small startup, we've been fortunate to work with the OpenSlide community
to wrap our heads around the various file formats out there. Thank you so very
much for a tremendous effort!

Following earlier announcements of free viewer software, we would likewise
invite you to try out our free contribution to the world of whole slide
imaging, digital pathology and virtual microscopy.

In order to give back, today we announce our own free "universal" whole slide
image viewer. (online registration required) It incorporates the OpenSlide
library, in addition to other formats like Olympus VSI and Nikon ND2. We
support immunofluorescence data, too. A full list of formats is available our
website at http://free.pathomation.com.

The software PMA.start is brought to you by Pathomation and currently runs on
various flavors of the Windows Operating System. In order to use it, you will
need to install a small server-side component that can be downloaded from the
website at http://free.pathomation.com.

Unlike earlier online initiatives, the solution from Pathomation does not
require you to upload files: after launching PMA.start, you're represented
with a tree structure representing your harddisk, and you can browse your data
just like you would in Windows Explorer.

While the viewing engine remains online our website, no imaging data is ever
transferred to us. We do keep track of viewed file formats in order to
determine where to focus our future efforts. Only the file extension is
tracked, in additional to limited technical meta-data, such as the used
compression scheme.

In order to facilitate image analysis, we offer a free ImageJ/FIJI plugin.
Instructions for this (as well as how to interact with CellProfiler) are
provided on the website. 

At a more general level, you may just be interested in getting image data
directly and passing it on to an OpenCV or GD algorithm. For that purpose, as
well as batch-processing, we make an API available. That's also described at a
separate page at http://free.pathomation.com/scripting-and-automation/

As with all software, there will be bugs. And feature requests. We welcome
constructive feedback in all shapes and sizes through the website or via
email.

You can start using Pathomation PMA.start at http://free.pathomation.com

Best regards

Yves Sucaet