A Java application for tissue section image analysis.
The medical industry has taken advantage of Java and Java technologies over the past few years, in large part due to the language's platform-independence and object-oriented structure. As such, Java provides powerful and effective tools for developing tissue section analysis software. The background and execution of this development are discussed in this publication. Object-oriented structure allows for the creation of "Slide", "Unit", and "Cell" objects to simulate the corresponding real-world objects. Different functions may then be created to perform various tasks on these objects, thus facilitating the development of the software package as a whole. At the current time, substantial parts of the initially planned functionality have been implemented. Getafics 1.0 is fully operational and currently supports a variety of research projects; however, there are certain features of the software that currently introduce unnecessary complexity and inefficiency. In the future, we hope to include features that obviate these problems.