Design of Virtual Microscope System using Wavelet Transform

The Virtual Microscope System is being implemented by a computer software system that performs highly realistic digital simulations of an analog, mechanical light microscope; the system aims to provide high-resolution digital images of a patient's tissue sample on the Internet. The main difficulty in providing that function consists in the efficiency of dealing with the extremely large quantities of data required for a large collection of slides. The Virtual Microscope software system is to simply emulate the usual behavior of a physical microscope, replacing cabinets full of slides of medical institutions with a digital storage system. This paper proposes an effective variableblock-based image compression technique using wavelet transform. To compress the wavelet transformed data, the proposed algorithm quantizes the wavelet coefficients using scalar quantizer for LL sub-band and vector quantizer for other sus-bands to increase the compression ratio and then uses arithmetic coding for entropy coding. The proposed system is a distributed system consisting of 3 parts: a client/user interface, which allows a user to view slides over a network, a data server, which retrieves the slide image data, and a network server, which allows the other two parts to communicate. The three parts, being mutually independent, exchange messages according to certain communication rules. The proposed system can apply to not only remote diagnosis and treatment but also remote meetings, conferences, and classrooms that need a virtual microscope.