Vendor Neutral Cloud Platform for 4D Digital Pathology.

In the last decade, digital technologies have been transforming clinical pathology, dematerializing the processes, improving the workflow, and promoting the development of decision support tools. The glass slides can be digitized with highquality scanners and sent to network archives, opening doors to data sharing and universal access. Despite these advancements, however, the adoption of digital pathology solutions in production environments has been slowed down by the lack of standardization in the available software. Among the improved visualization features in digital pathology is the ability to capture a series of images at the same spatial location with varying focal planes, also known as Z-stack. This article proposes a full-stack, standard solution that efficiently supports the visualization of these 4D images. It is a Cloud-based architecture that supports Z-stack image management and visualization. The solution is made vendor-neutral by providing a pipeline for the integration of different image vendors.