EDITOR’S NOTE: The College of American Pathologists (CAP), the leading organization of board-certified pathologists, publishes the monthly newspaper “CAP Today.” The November 2014 issue (Vol. 28, No. 11) contains the article “Software expands on ‘what you see is what you get’” by writer Jan Bowers — describing the collaboration between the UIC Pathology Department and the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL).
For several years, EVL has worked with Bruce Levy, M.D., Associate Professor of UIC Clinical Pathology, Director of the UIC Clinical Informatics Program, Associate Director of the UIC Pathology Residency Program, and Associate Chief Health Information Officer of the University of Illinois Hospital and Health Sciences System.
Initially Levy was using SAGE™, the EVL-developed Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment. SAGE is a software architecture that enables users to interactively access, display and share a variety of data-intensive information, in a variety of resolutions and formats, from multiple sources, on tiled display walls. Recently, he became an early adaptor and test site of the next-generation SAGE2™ software infrastructure. In his article for CAP Today, he expresses his enthusiasm for SAGE2’s new capabilities and ease of use. Levy says, “I think it’s an exciting tool with a lot of potential applications we haven’t even thought of yet. I believe it will have huge value for collaboration and teaching, not just in pathology but also in other areas of medicine.”
Levy’s enthusiasm was such that he gave a demonstration of SAGE2 with an EVL-developed histology viewer at the 2nd International Congress of the International Academy of Digital Pathology in Boston on November 6, 2014. EVL only formally announced SAGE2 at the IEEE/ACM Supercomputing 2014 conference in New Orleans on November 17, 2014.
The CAP Today article contains interviews with both Levy and EVL research assistant and Computer Science PhD student Victor Mateevitsi. To read the article, see: http://www.captodayonline.com/newsbytes-5/
SAGE2 team members are from the Laboratory for Advanced Visualization & Applications at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at University of Illinois at Chicago. SAGE/SAGE2 receives major support from the National Science Foundation award # ACI-1441963. SAGE and SAGE2 are trademarks of the University of Illinois Board of Trustees.
Photo: A one-screen SAGE wall in Bruce Levy’s office shows the potential for a pathologist¹s cockpit that enables him to view a case digitally instead of with a microscope. This specific example shows a variety of images from a renal biopsy case. It includes the standard H&E (hematoxylin and eosin) stain, two fluorescent stains and some SEM (scanning electron microscope) images. (Photo courtesy of Bruce Levy, UIC Pathology)