LiveMicro: An Edge Computing System for Collaborative Telepathology

Telepathology is the practice of digitizing histological images for transmission along telecommunication pathways for diagnosis, consultation or continuing medical education. Existing telepathology solutions are limited to offline or delay-tolerant diagnosis. In this paper we present LiveMicro, a telepathology system that, leveraging edge computing, enables multiple pathologists to collaborate on a diagnosis by allowing a remote live control of a microscope. In such environment, computation at the edge is used in three ways: (1) to allow remote users to control the microscope simultaneously, (2) to process histological image and live video, by running algorithms that recognize e.g., tumor grades, (3) to preserve privacy creating virtual shared data views. In particular, we built the first opensource edge computing based telepathology system. In our prototype, the examples of edge processing that we currently support are extraction of diagnosis-oriented features and compression of payloads to minimize transmission delays. Our evaluation shows how LiveMicro can help a medical team with a remote, faster and more accurate diagnosis.