Work at Addenbrooke's demonstrates that Auto-Montage Pro is useful where a focused microscope image of a 3D pathogen is essential to confirm diagnosis and speed up treatment of debilitating diseases.
Syncroscopy reports that Auto-Montage Pro, its 3D image reconstruction software, has been successfully used at a major UK teaching hospital, Addenbrooke's Hospital, part of the Cambridge University Hospitals group, (UK), to help confirm diagnosis of schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease rarely seen in the UK.
Pathologists in the department of histopathology used Auto-Montage Pro as a diagnostic tool to produce in-focus microscope images of the abnormality within the brain biopsy from an adult patient who had recently developed focal epileptic seizures.
With the help of these images, the eggs of Schistosoma mansoni, one of several species of flatworm that cause schistosomiasis, could be identified and characterised.
Schistosomiasis is a common chronic disease in Africa and Asia, where the patient had extensively travelled, but is not endemic to the UK.
Andrew Dean, neuropathologist in the department of histology explained:"For diagnosis and specific identification, sometimes we need to produce images of parasites or micro-organisms that are too large to be sharply focused in a single focal plane at the required magnification.
"This is why we tried Auto-Montage Pro, to see if it would generate images from a microscope that had all the detail we needed to solve this problem.
"The technical staff at Syncroscopy were very helpful in showing us how to use Auto-Montage Pro for this application, and our trial of the software generated an image that improved confidence in the diagnosis of schistosomiasis, a disease we rarely see in the UK.
"We were so impressed with the images we used them in a presentation at a scientific meeting, in an article published in The Lancet and also as part of our teaching and training set at the department of histopathology".
