Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment: A Novel Way to View and Manipulate Whole-Slide Images

The Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment (SAGE) was developed at theUniversity of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) to facilitate collaborative efforts that require the sharing of data-intensive information for analysis. SAGE is a cross-platform, communitydriven, open-source visualization and collaboration tool that enables users to access, display, and share a variety of dataintensive information, in a variety of resolutions and format, frommultiple sources, on tiled display walls of arbitrary size. SAGE walls have had the ability to display digital-cinema animations, high resolution images, high-definition videoconferences, presentation slides, documents, spreadsheets, and computer screens; however, there was no way to display and manipulate histologic whole-slide images (WSIs). Our desire was to create a tool to permit the importation, display, and manipulation of WSI in the SAGE environment.