Iris: A Next Generation Digital Pathology Rendering Engine

Digital pathology is a tool of rapidly evolving importance within the discipline of pathology. Whole slide imaging promises numerous advantages; however, adoption is limited by challenges in ease of use and speed of high-quality image rendering relative to the simplicity and visual quality of glass slides. Herein, we introduce Iris, a new high-performance digital pathology rendering system. Specifically, we outline and detail the performance metrics of Iris Core, the core rendering engine technology. Iris Core comprises machine code modules written from the ground up in C++ and using Vulkan, a low-level and low-overhead cross-platform graphical processing unit application program interface, and our novel rapid tile buffering algorithms. We provide a detailed explanation of Iris Core's system architecture, including the stateless isolation of core processes, interprocess communication paradigms, and explicit synchronization paradigms that provide powerful control over the graphical processing unit. Iris Core achieves slide rendering at the sustained maximum frame rate on all tested platforms (120 FPS) and buffers an entire new slide field of view, without overlapping pixels, in 10 ms with enhanced detail in 30 ms. Further, it is able to buffer and compute high-fidelity reduction-enhancements for viewing low-power cytology with increased visual quality at a rate of 100–160 μs per slide tile, and with a cumulative median buffering rate of 1.36 GB of decompressed image data per second. This buffering rate allows for an entirely new field of view to be fully buffered and rendered in less than a single monitor refresh on a standard display, and high detail features within 2–3 monitor refresh frames. These metrics far exceed previously published specifications, beyond an order of magnitude in some contexts. The system shows no slowing with high use loads, but rather increases performance due to graphical processing unit cache control mechanisms and is “future-proof” due to near unlimited parallel scalability.