Christoph Brochhausen*, REPAIR-lab, Institute of Pathology, University Medical Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Mainz, Germany Hinrich Winther*, REPAIR-lab, Institute of Pathology, University Medical Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Mainz, Germany Harald Affeldt, Department of Research and Teaching, University Medical Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Mainz, Germany Andreas Grüne, Grüne Kommunikationsdesign, Bodenheim, Germany C James Kirkpatrick, REPAIR-lab, Institute of Pathology, University Medical Centre of the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz, Mainz, Germany Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Digital Learning Presentation Type: Poster presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Last modified: 2013-09-25

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Aims:
Web-based learning tools are of great interest in medical education. Based on a student questionnaire a new Whole Slide Imaging (WSI) application named Pate (http://pate.um-nainz.de) was developed. The questionnaire was conducted to assess the needs of students as well as their previous experiences with WSI. As a result one of the goals in development is to provide an interface for desktop PCs and devices with small screens, i.e. tablet PCs and smart-phones. Furthermore, it was necessary to implement a touch-compatible interface besides the classical mouse / keyboard input. Two years of development lead to a modern HTML 5 / JavaScript-based WSI application with slides enriched by points of interest (POI), annotations and teaching texts.
Methods:
To achieve platform independency we decided to implement modern HTML 5 technologies in combination with JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheets on the client side. Since the implementation, especially of JavaScript, in modern browsers is not coherent it was beneficial to utilize abstraction frameworks. For this purpose, we relied on open source technology employing frameworks like OpenLayers and JQuery.
On the server side we chose TurboGears 2.2 as Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI) Framework in combination with Apache Web Server. To achieve good data replication performance and to ensure data integrity a relational database was used. In the current implementation MySQL was used. To ensure rapid application development and flexibility object relational mapping techniques were employed.
Results:
For nearly one year the application is available for the students. While being a sole WSI solution in the beginning, over time we added additional features like informational texts, Points of Interest and annotations. The use of OpenLayers framework has shown several advantages: it provides solid WSI functionality and at the same time it made it easy to provide a touch interface for mobile devices. In our tests only Android devices older than 2 years revealed problems due to their lack of multi-touch support in the native browser. This can be avoided by installing a third party browser to the device.
Discussion:
Based on a questionnaire a demand-driven WSI with special features such as annotations, points of interest and teaching texts could be established. Since students actually use a wide range of different device types from mobile (i.e.: IPhone and Android), over tablets to desktop PCs the presented web application Pate supports different software platforms. In this regard the decision to implement the client side in modern web technologies like HTML 5 was advantageous. Finally, the present solution allowed us to support most devices while maintaining a single code base.