Aleksandra Zuraw: [00:01:11] Hi everyone. Today my guest is Doug Stapleton, the service manager of the digital slide scanning division at Hamamatsu. And today we’re going to be talking about how to choose a whole slide scanner. Hi, Doug. How are you?
Doug Stapleton: [00:01:28] I’m doing well. Thank you.
Aleksandra: [00:01:29] Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. And let’s start with introducing yourself to the listeners.
Doug: [00:01:35] Okay. I’m Doug Stapleton. I’m the service manager for Hamamatsu corporation for the digital slide scanner division. And I’ve been in this field for about 30 years.
Aleksandra: [00:01:47] So you are the service manager. What does a service manager do at Hamamatsu?
Doug: [00:01:52] The service manager basically coordinates all of the service activities from scheduling people for service calls, troubleshooting, trade shows, installations of demos, installation of actual systems, things like that.
Aleksandra: [00:02:07] So, you know, those scanners inside out.
Doug: [00:02:10] Yes, I know them pretty well.
Aleksandra: [00:02:13] So where are you located?
Doug: [00:02:15] I’m actually in Chicago, Illinois.
Aleksandra: [00:02:18] And where’s the Hamamatsu digital pathology division headquarters. If you have something like that?
Doug: [00:02:24] So our headquarters for Hamamatsu corporation in the US is actually in New Jersey. And the factory is actually in Hamamatsu city, Japan.
Aleksandra: [00:02:34] Okay. So how does the digital pathology division fit into the Hamamatsu corporation?
Doug: [00:02:43] Actually, the digital pathology division is a smaller portion of the company we make between 10 and 12,000 different components.
[00:02:51] And then there’s three products in the systems division. And we are one of the products in the system division. So we’re probably one of three products that actually goes all the way to the end user. The rest are all within other people’s systems.
Aleksandra: [00:03:06] So what products does the division offer?
Doug: [00:03:09] Our division offers [00:03:11] actually four different scanners, the SQ, which is a single slide scanner. And we’ve got the S60, which is a 60 slide scanner. It can do one by three, two by three, and also has fluorescence as an option. We’ve got an S210 that does 210 slides and then an S360, which is our high throughput scanner that handles up to 360 slides.
Aleksandra: [00:03:32] So you cover everything from single user to high throughput lab,
Doug: [00:03:38] Yes, correct. One to 360.
Aleksandra: [00:03:41] The goal of today’s episode is to tell the listeners how to approach buying a scanner. So. I want to ask you what are the things they should consider when evaluating a whole slide scanner.
[00:03:56] Someone wants to buy a scanner. What are the questions they need to ask themselves to choose the best product for them?
Doug: [00:04:04] Okay. So there’s actually that’s a great question. And a good way to start is budget. I would say [00:04:11] budget and throughput, are two of the main questions. What can you afford? And what’s your expected throughput of slides and what are you going to do with the slides?
[00:04:22] So one of our scanners has a fluorescent option. So are you doing just Brookfield? Are you doing Brightfield and fluorescence? Are you concentrating on just fluorescence Most people start out with Brightfield and they progress into fluorescence sometimes. But then, like I said, throughput is a big factor.
[00:04:41] What’s your capacities? We’ve got single slide, 60 slide, 210 slide, 360 slide. So you have to figure out what your intended use is. I always suggest to people to think about not just now, but the future, because typically when somebody purchases a digital slide scanner, even though they’ve been out for a long time, sometimes it’s a new.
[00:05:04] Acquisition for them. And they end up finding out that there’s a lot of people that are interested in digitizing slides. [00:05:11] maybe it was something that they never had before, or maybe it’s something they used in a previous job or, a different role. And usually once people buy one, it becomes something that’s very popular.
[00:05:26] If it’s in a core lab or in a research lab where more and more people find out about it in your company and they want more things digitized because now it’s an option that they didn’t have before.
Aleksandra: [00:05:37] So would you recommend to check in your institution what the demand would be?
Doug: [00:05:43] Yes. Typically it starts off as a departmental purchase, like somebody in pathology or in research decides that they’re going to purchase a scanner for a specific reason or a project or a task, and then other people find out about it. So now, like the next lab down might be digitizing things. So it’s a good idea to check with your colleagues and within your institution to find out if other people are interested in this, [00:06:11] or even sometimes there’s other scanners on-site that people don’t even know about.
[00:06:15] Someone’s got one in a smaller scanner in their office or in a small lab off of the main lab and nobody even knows it’s there.
Aleksandra: [00:06:22] Okay. So we know about the, budget and we know about the throughput we asked across the organization, we know how many people would be interested, more or less what’s next.
Doug: [00:06:35] So also after that, I would be, how much space do you have in your lab? Lab space is always a constraint. So some of our systems like the smaller unit, the sq sits on top of a bench top. The S60 sits on top. The 210 sits on top But the 360 comes with its own cart. So how much room do you have and do you have space for it?
[00:06:58] The units also should be on a very stable countertop, like a lab countertop. And not being near something that’s causing vibration and things like a centrifuge or a minus 80 freezer [00:07:11] that could be up against the table because just like with a microscope you’re magnifying, an object or a slide in this case.
[00:07:19] And any vibration can cause issues with focus and or blurriness in the images. So that’s something to consider as well. So. Space on the table or lab bench, and also the room around it because it’s not only the space for the scanner, but most of the scanners are, I know for sure, come with a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse.
[00:07:40] So you need space for that as well. a small work area, at least, maybe two foot wider, 30 inches wide for those parts of the system.
Aleksandra: [00:07:50] So you said people usually start with brightfield and then do immunofluorescence every now and then that means you need to know this upfront if we need immunofluorescence.
[00:08:01] Even if you do it sporadically, you would then need to buy a system that has this capability.
Doug: [00:08:08] Yes, definitely has the capability. So our S60, [00:08:11] for instance, you can purchase Brightfield or Brightfield with fluorescence. So. You could actually add the fluorescence once it’s in the field. maybe you start off, like I said, with just Brightfield and then someone has the need for fluorescence.
[00:08:27] It can be added. It can also be purchased from us that way with that option already installed.
Aleksandra: [00:08:35] Oh, that’s great because I thought you had to make this decision upfront, but apparently not, you can decide.
Doug: [00:08:43] Correct. So we try and be flexible and not everybody knows, like I said, people buy an instrument for now, but I always say you should plan for the future because things always change.
[00:08:54] And with these, I would call them a tool. these scanners. People don’t realize how useful they are and all the things they can do. You can digitize all the slides that come into your lab. Maybe you’re doing consultation for someone and you have to send the glass slides back. Well, you can digitize the slides and [00:09:11] have them forever.
[00:09:11] With fluorescence, the whole idea behind fluorescence is capturing fluorescence at their peak. So fluorescence slides degrade sometimes rather quickly. So if you can capture them at their peak of fluorescence, They’ll never be better than that. And if they degrade, you already have the digital image of it.
[00:09:33] So it’s not as important to you or it’s not as big of an impact to you. If the slides degrade over time.
Aleksandra: [00:09:40] What about the workflow and the integration of the scanner with other systems in the lab? How do you evaluate that? How do you approach that?
Doug: [00:09:51] That’s another good question. So we have the scanners.
[00:09:54] We have a NDP.serve3 , which is a server. And then most people have LIS these units are used mostly in the research realm. So some people have LIS some people don’t, some people have homegrown LIS. So we actually have an [00:10:11] option that we have, basically a programmer that integrates between the server and whatever LIS, whether it’s a off-the-shelf LIS, a homegrown LIS, whatever it is, we’re flexible with that because we have the tools to be able to communicate with whatever you have.
Aleksandra: [00:10:30] So your scanners do have an open API and you offer this as a service, somebody from your team
Doug: [00:10:37] It’s on the tail end. Yes.
Aleksandra: [00:10:39] Fantastic. Okay. So we know how much money we want to spend if we just want to digitize one slide every now and then it’s going to be the small scanner that is obviously cheaper.
[00:10:50] If we want to go full digital, it’s going to be the 360 one from the NanoZoomer series of yours. And, we know what we’re going to do. How many people want that we know how much space we know that we can integrate it. Okay. We know everything. What do we do? Next When we know [00:11:11] all of the relevant features for us.
[00:11:13] What are our next steps?
Doug: [00:11:15] Some other purchasing concerns would be, what types of slides are you doing besides brightfield or fluorescence? Are they one by three slides? Are they two by three slides? Most labs run one by three slides. All of our units handle one by three slides. The S60 is capable of handling two by three slides.
[00:11:32] And I find that’s a very, interesting question to ask people. Do you run two by three slides? People have either never heard of it or that’s their sole purpose in life is to scan two by three slides. So the S60 is actually our multi-purpose system. It will run one by three slides, two by three slides, Brightfield, And it also has the fluorescence capability. So that’s our all-in-one system. So some of the other things to be concerned with, like we talked about, capacity is, also a factor in this, but also magnification. What, mag are you going to be scanning at? Most of these systems. [00:12:11] Scan at 20X and have 40X. we have 20X scanning and 40X mode on all of our systems. So we can digitize that 20X and 40X resolution. we can also do Z-stacking. Some people for cytology want to do Z-stacks. so you can take multiple planes and actually capture all of that data. And with our viewer actually roll through it.
[00:12:35] Just like you’re at a microscope, you can see multiple planes, by using the mouse wheel or the keyboard to scroll through each one. So there’s a lot of functionality with our systems and with digital slide scanners in general and, I think our viewer is the top viewer out there it’s been that way for probably about five years.
[00:12:55] It’s very easy to use. Very intuitive. And you can have multiple users on it and you can also have multiple windows open we can have up to 12 screens, open per monitor, and we can handle two monitors. The viewer is as important [00:13:11] or more important than the scanner because yes, you have to digitize the slides, but you need to be able to access view and manipulate the slides with ease.
[00:13:20] And that’s really important.
Aleksandra: [00:13:22] And this is something that comes with the Hamamatsu scanners.
Doug: [00:13:25] Yes, our, standard scanners come with. they’re basically turnkey products. You’ve got, a ups, which is a backup battery power supply. In case you have power issues at your location, a computer, a monitor, a mouse, all the scanning software that you need to run the system, which is the NDP.scan or NZ.adjust and the viewer.
[00:13:51] So basically. When you buy one of our systems, it’s a turnkey system. You can scan the slides and view slides without having to buy anything else. The other parts that we talked about, like NDP.serve3 and the it integration are options that you can buy either post or during the acquisition [00:14:11] of your scanner.
Aleksandra: [00:14:12] So, this definitely is going to be also something to look into when you’re thinking about buying a scanner. Is it just a scanner and you have to purchase other components? I know most of the scanners come with a viewer. Is this viewer compatible with what you want to do? Okay. So then. What else? Is there anything else we should think about
Doug: [00:14:36] Another thing I just thought of when you said compatible.
[00:14:39] So most of our stuff is PC-based, Most of our scanning software and our viewing software, but we also offer, Mac-compatible viewers. So there’s a lot of people that are either a PC or Mac and we support Mac as well.
Aleksandra: [00:14:54] We know what we want, basically it’s determined by the intended use. and when we know our intended use, it’s going to guide us through the scanner specs that we need.
[00:15:06] We have that already written down. What do we do? What’s the [00:15:11] process at Hamamatsu when somebody knows what they want and they approach you about purchasing something.
Doug: [00:15:18] Okay. so I’ll go into that in one second. I just thought of something else. with our scanners, we have the versatility of doing with the big systems, fully automatic batches.
[00:15:30] So you just load the slides and walk away. We also have semiautomatic, which allows you to load slides, view the slides. You can pick your own scan regions and focus points, and also single slide mode. So the high throughput systems, typically everybody runs them on fully automatic. These options are available on all of our scanner models.
[00:15:52] So again, single slide mode, batch, fully automatic and semiautomatic. So the single slide mode actually allows you to scan slides that are troublesome or have a hard time being focused on you can actually use all of our systems, just like a microscope, lay down, focus points, and actually [00:16:11] view each focus point to achieve perfect in focus areas and then let the system scan. So they’re super versatile. I would say on scanning systems, typically about 80, to 85% of the slides that you put in it, you can scan right off the bat without changing too many things. we also have profiles within our scanners that allow you to set up thresholds and different things for actually scanning different types of slides. So doing automatic tissue detection, laying down focus points and things like that. So our systems are super versatile and we hear from a lot of people that the interface is really easy to use. So that would be another key feature is how easy is it to scan and how many clicks does it take to scan?
[00:17:01] Because with our systems, it usually only takes probably less than five clicks and you’re actually scanning, opening the software, launching the software loading slides. [00:17:11] Scanning it, all of that is very easy. And that’s something else to think about when you’re purchasing a scanner, because there may be one or more people using the system.
[00:17:20] You have to make sure it’s user-friendly as well. So back to your question on the, actual steps for purchasing a system, typically our sales engineers will interact with potential customers and customers to find out what their needs are. Ask a lot of these same questions that we talked about earlier with.
[00:17:39] Throughput budgets, capacities, space, timeframe for purchase all of these things. But we also talk about what types of slides and things you are going to use. The other thing to keep in mind, speaking of slides is when you’re scanning slides, you want slides that are clean, dried, They’ve been dried for, 12 to 24 hours.
[00:18:03] Labels not hanging off cover slips, not hanging off all of those for robotic machines. can be problematic for loading and unloading. [00:18:11] So we’re looking for good clean quality slides. and once the salesperson has spoken with the end user about what types of slides possibly discussed about their future needs for, capacity.
[00:18:25] Then we have people send slides into us and we figure out which system they’re looking at, whether it’s, an sq, a 210, an S60, or a 360, and we can scan slides on those models and then either send you back the digital slides or share them on one of our other products like NDP.serve3, and log in with the viewer and show you exactly how everything would look and feel for you to see you see these, In my mind, it’s always a lot more impressive to see your own slides being digitized and actually viewed on a monitor because that’s your work and you’re familiar with what it should look like, how it looked on a microscope and the actual [00:19:11] feel of the digital version of it now. So anybody can scan their own slides and have them archived someplace.
[00:19:17] But to have, the customer, send their slides in and have us digitize. Those it, really drives the point home that this is the way of the future.
Aleksandra: [00:19:27] And this is a standard procedure at Hamamatsu that people can do that.
Doug: [00:19:30] Yes. Yes. And then we return the slides and either give them the digital slides on some type of media or over the internet with, an FTP server or something like that.
[00:19:40] So they ended up with the glass slides, back and the virtual slides.
Aleksandra: [00:19:45] So you mentioned the NDP.serve3, This is something that can be used for televiewing, if I understand correctly.
Doug: [00:19:53] Yes. Yes. So it’s a multipurpose tool that can be used for basically managing the slides. You’ve got the slides in a single or many drives on a server or a NAS, and this tool,
[00:20:09] NDP.serve3 , can be used to [00:20:11] access these things securely there’s username and log-ins. so they’re secure and you can allow access rights and privileges to certain folders, certain slides, you can set it up just about any way you want, and then people can remotely log into the server and view slides that way.
Aleksandra: [00:20:30] So if I have one of your machines and have this service, I can basically give access to a colleague of mine that I would want to ask for consultation. Or let’s say somebody is giving me slides for digitizing and wants to see them. I can give them access to that. So I can do tele-pathology with this.
Doug: [00:20:52] Correct. So we also have added features for serve that are things like a multi-headed microscope. So we have the abilities to send links, like if you had a slide that you were looking at and you had a certain area of interest, we have the ability to mark up the slide with, [00:21:11] overlays, you could do pointers measurements, simple counting and things like that.
[00:21:16] And then send a link to one of your colleagues. You would grant them access to the server. Once they click on the link, it would open in a viewer. you can either have the viewer on your computer or use the viewer that’s built into the server. Some it departments don’t allow you to install your own software.
[00:21:35] So we have multimodalities to handle that, whether it’s you, pre-install our NDP.view2, or you just log into the server and use the viewer on the server so that you’re not actually installing any external viewer. And it allows you to view a slides and you can also have this. Multi-headed microscope option or conference is what we call it.
[00:21:58] You could have multiple colleagues log in. One person could be the driver. And it’s just like, you’re all sitting in a multi-headed microscope, one person’s driving and maybe narrating and showing different features of a slide or a scan. [00:22:11] And then you can pass the pointer to another person who has noticed some other feature that they want to speak about and use that to share information.We’ve had this for years, but especially with, COVID and things where people are more remote, this would allow people to really interact more easily, simulating a multi-headed microscope.
Aleksandra: [00:22:32] I like this feature a lot. So this all comes with your software with your system.
[00:22:37] That is…
Doug: [00:22:38] So this is an option off of NDP.serve3. So there’s also people that just buy, like NDP.serve3. Maybe they don’t scan slides. Maybe they only house slides or. Do image analysis and things on slides. So you could have NDP.serve3 , and it would be basically your repository of slides that you could access in the future.
[00:22:59] Like I said, a lot of people will actually digitize all of the slides that they consult on or actually pass through their lab. So in the future, if somebody said, Hey, slide 1, 2, 3, [00:23:11] on this date, I’ve got a question on, Well, you guys can access that, pull it up and you’ve got the virtual copy.
Aleksandra: [00:23:17] Right. Definitely full of features. And we know all the basic questions that we have to ask ourselves. Everything is driven by our use case. And your team also helps with that process in case we are not totally sure what we want and if there are any other questions that we should concern, the team is going to help with that.
[00:23:41] I will put that, as a mini guide to how to choose the scanner in the show notes. Thank you so much Doug, for giving us all this information and showcasing us the Hamamatsu products and the options. That was very informative.
Doug: [00:23:58] Thank you for the invitation. I like to, talk about our systems and especially about this technology.
[00:24:03] It’s something I’ve done for a long time.
Aleksandra: [00:24:06] So if the listeners want to contact you, what’s the best way to contact you or to [00:24:11] find you online?
Doug: [00:24:12] Probably the easiest way is either LinkedIn, or email.
Aleksandra: [00:24:16] How do they find you on LinkedIn?
Doug: [00:24:19] Just look up my name, which is Doug Stapleton or Hamamatsu.
Aleksandra: [00:24:23] Okay. I will link to your profile in the show notes as well.
Doug: [00:24:27] Awesome. Thank you.
Aleksandra: [00:24:28] Thank you very much and have a great day.
Doug: [00:24:30] Thanks, you too.
