VIRMISCO – The Virtual Microscope Slide Collection

Digitisation allows scientists rapid access to research objects. For transparent to semi-transparent three-dimensional microscopic objects, such as microinvertebrates or small body parts of organisms, available databases are scarce. Most mounting media used for permanent microscope slides deteriorate after some years or decades, eventually leading to total damage and loss of the object. However, restoration is labour-intensive, and often the composition of the mounting media is not known. A digital preservation of important material, especially types, is important and an urgent need. The Virtual Microscope Slide Collection – VIRMISCO project has developed recommendations for taking microscopic image stacks of three-dimensional objects, depositing and presenting such series of digital image files or z-stacks as an online platform. The core of VIRMISCO is an online viewer, which enables the user to virtually focus through an object online as if using a real microscope. Additionally, VIRMISCO offers features such as search, rotating, zooming, measuring, changing brightness or contrast, taking snapshots, leaving feedback as well as downloading complete z-stacks as jpeg files or video file. The open source system can be installed by any institution and can be linked to common database or images can be sent to the Senckenberg Museum of Natural History Görlitz. The benefits of VIRMISCO are the preservation of important or fragile material, to avoid loan, to act as a digital archive for image files and to allow determination by experts from the distance, as well as providing reference libraries for taxonomic research or education and providing image series as online supplementary material for publications or digital vouchers of specimens of molecular investigations are relevant applications for VIRMISCO.

Results of the implementation of a virtual microscope in a course of histology

The course of Anatomy and Histology is studied in the first year of Dentistry at the University Cardenal Herrera CEU (Alfara del Patriarca, Spain). Its practices consist on choose freely six samples and draw their most representative features. These practices were made by optical microscopy until 2014, and in 2015 was introduced the virtual microscope exclusively. The aim of the study is to test whether this new teaching method has improved the quality of exercise and the understanding shown by students. First, the best exercises of both years were chosen, and from them some drawings from the same tissue were compared. Some tissues which samples for optical microscope were hard to obtain, were drawn for the very first time thanks to the virtual microscope. Also, with the virtual microscopy the drawings contained more details and definition. The understanding of the structures improved, shown by a more functional, detailed and defined vision of the tissues. The labels of the virtual microscope helped to the self-study and avoided the loss of unnoticed structures. In conclusion, replacement of optical microscope by the virtual microscope is a teaching improvement and facilitates student learning.