Virtual Microscopy is a high resolution digitisation of whole tissue sections. These so called Virtual Slides (VS) have a size up to 40 GB (130000*90000 pixel) uncompressed. Compressed, our VS have an average size of about 1 to 1.5 GB. This dimension or the viewing of the whole slide in such a high resolution explains the sometimes long loading times.
 

With the VS-viewer you can view the whole slide with high resolution and a stepless zoom. The VS-Viewer is only loading the image information from the actual field of view and their adjacent images ("prefetching"). This enables an efficient viewing speed.
 
Zooming is done with the + or - button in the "Toolbar" (bottom left). Alternatively you can use "Shift" or "A" on the keyboard for zooming in (magnifying) respectively "Ctrl" or "Z" for zooming out (demagnifying). Panning is done with the arrows on the "Toolbar", with the mouse (left-click in the image, hold and move) or with the arrow keys on the keyboard. With a click on you get back to the initial zoom.
In the left top corner there is an overview image of the whole slide ("NavWindow"). The red rectangle is showing the actual field of view and is useful for orientation on the slide. A moving of the rectangle with the mouse enables a fast and direct change to a specific position of the slide at higher magnifications.
 

The structures of In green highlighted text can be directly accessed as a "POI" (Point of Interest) via the "Annotation" window (top right corner). In the small image window the specific section is shown. By clicking on "GO" or on this small image window the POI will be shown directly in the big slide window.
Annotations can be shown or suppressed with on the "Toolbar".