Olympus won a pair of awards at the first European Scanner Contest, which took place May 25-29 in Berlin, running parallel to the 94th annual meeting of the German Society of Pathology. With categories in quality, mass scanning and cytology, the Olympus VS110-S5 was the winner of two of the three quality awards: scanning mixed slides at 20× and 40× (0.16 µm). These highlight the device's ability to accurately image three predetermined diagnostically relevant regions of interest in 10 different slides, the company said. Ten slides were presented for analysis by several independent institutions, each of a different origin (skin, breast, kidney, etc.) and staining (hematoxylin and eosin, periodic acid-Schiff and toluidine blue, for example). Each participating instrument was used to scan the entire area of all of the ten slides, with the resultant virtual images searched to identify three predetermined diagnostically relevant ROIs. These were then subjectively ranked in order of image quality by the pathologists who attended the meeting. By combining microscopy with imaging, the VS110 scanner line offers pathologists the potential to create a virtual slide, which is an exact copy of the real specimen, for remote and online discussion, Olympus said. Through the generation of high-resolution images of whole specimens, samples can be viewed and analyzed from the overview image or at maximum magnification and resolution by simply zooming in. The three scanner models have been tailored to match different applications and workloads. The VS110-S1 entry-level system allows standard slides to be loaded manually, making it ideal for educational purposes. The VS110-S5 is designed for medium workloads in routine pathology, education and research. It can hold up to five standard slides on the stage simultaneously, for semiautomated batch scanning. The VS110-L100 is engineered for high workload pathology and research environments, with the ability to hold up to 100 slides. An integrated barcode scanner reads all 1-D and 2-D formats, enabling the automation of slide data entry. For more information, visit: www.microscopy.olympus.eu