OpenSlide: A vendor-neutral software foundation for digital pathology

TLDR

Digital pathology faces storage, transmission, processing, and interoperability challenges due to proprietary vendor formats lacking a universal standard. This work introduces OpenSlide, a vendor‑neutral C library for reading and manipulating digital pathology slides across diverse vendor formats. OpenSlide is extensible, provides a language‑agnostic interface, and allows applications to transparently process multiple vendor formats. OpenSlide is adopted by numerous academic and industrial groups worldwide, including NIH‑funded research sites in the United States.

Abstract

Although widely touted as a replacement for glass slides and microscopes in pathology, digital slides present major challenges in data storage, transmission, processing and interoperability. Since no universal data format is in widespread use for these images today, each vendor defines its own proprietary data formats, analysis tools, viewers and software libraries. This creates issues not only for pathologists, but also for interoperability. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of OpenSlide, a vendor-neutral C library for reading and manipulating digital slides of diverse vendor formats. The library is extensible and easily interfaced to various programming languages. An application written to the OpenSlide interface can transparently handle multiple vendor formats. OpenSlide is in use today by many academic and industrial organizations world-wide, including many research sites in the United States that are funded by the National Institutes of Health.