SlideTap: The bridge between developer and pathologist

Bridging gaps with SlideTap

SlideTap is designed to optimize the digital slide curation process. Erik O Gabrielsson, Bigpicture WP4 member, and Research Engineer at Sectra, explains, "This is an application that serves as a bridge between the Technical experts that facilitate data export in the backend, and pathologists that curate the data in the frontend."

On the Bigpicture platform, the SlideTap software will help to improve collaboration and efficiency. Erik notes, "It makes it possible to view the data in a way that can't be done otherwise. By abstracting data from various systems and ensuring it conforms to standards, SlideTap allows pathologists to visualize and interact with data through a graphical interface.” 

Enhancing dataset quality

With the implementation of SlideTap, users of the Bigpicture platform can look forward to an intuitive interface that significantly reduces the complexity of managing large datasets. Erik: “SlideTap provides an integrated system where everything is linked together, allowing users to navigate through related data effortlessly.” The software allows data to be extracted, packaged, and visualized in a consistent and efficient manner, simplifying data extraction and annotation. It even flags any issues with the slides and provides suggestions for data entry based on historical use, a feature that vastly improves efficiency. “This significantly enhances the integrity and quality of the datasets,” Erik adds.

SlideTap’s metadata model for Bigpicture

Developing SlideTap came with a few challenges, particularly in creating a flexible and adaptable metadata standard. Erik explains, "We needed to establish a data structure that can grow with your needs. Given the variety of data sources and their unique requirements, creating a flexible yet orderly structure was essential.”

Erik and the team designed SlideTap’s metadata model to be comprehensive, ensuring it could cover extensive data attributes while staying user-friendly. Erik says, “This model is key to SlideTap's functionality, allowing for smooth integration and management of complex data within the Bigpicture project and beyond.”

SlideTap’s coming up features

One of the forthcoming features of the SlideTap software includes the ability to work with smaller batches of slides within larger projects, making tasks more manageable. Erik highlights the importance of community feedback in shaping the tool's evolution, which already led to improvement and additional features like bulk editing of slides. An improved preview landing page is also on the horizon, aiming to facilitate even smoother project submissions.

SlideTap is an open-sourced tool on Github. Find it here.