TelePi: Assembly, Installation and Customization Guide v1

Authors:
Preprint
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Telepathology facilitates histological diagnoses through sharing expertise between pathologists, with added benefits in terms of teaching and potential research collaborations. However, the associated costs are high and frequently prohibitive, especially in low-resource settings, where telepathology would paradoxically be of paramount importance due to a paucity of pathologists. We have constructed a telepathology system (TelePi) with a budget of < 120 € using the small, single-board computer Raspberry Pi Zero and its High-Quality Camera Module in conjunction with a standard microscope and open-source software on a Linux operating system. The system requires no additional hardware parts, maintenance costs or service contracts, has a small footprint, can be moved and shared across several microscopes, and is independent from other computer operating systems. TelePi uses a responsive and high-resolution web-based live stream which allows remote consultation between two or more locations. TelePi has several potential usage scenarios. It can serve as a telepathology system for remote diagnostics of frozen sections. Additionally, it can be used as a standard microscope camera for teaching of medical students and for basic research. When paired with the open-source image analysis package Fiji, it allows for stitching of multiple images taken at high resolution into one large image that exceeds the field of view of the chosen objective. The quality of the TelePi system compared favorable to a commercially available telepathology system that exceed its cost by more than 125-fold. Additionally, still images are of publication quality equal to that of a whole slide scanner that costs 800 times more. In summary, TelePi is an affordable, versatile, and inexpensive camera system that potentially enables telepathology in low-resource settings without sacrificing image quality.