The free viewing software for digital samples created by Metafer (VSViewer) can be installed on any Windows computer with network access to the image data. The simplified, modern user interface offers all customary viewing tools offered by handy toolbars which can be hidden, minimized, snapped to the window corner, or freely arranged on the desktop. Panning and zooming are done with the mouse and the mouse wheel.
The viewer has many options for displaying image metadata. For example, current Metafer coordinates can be visualized as grids on the image. Also the location of the fields of view (FOV), that are, the single original camera images, can be shown as an overlay to the image. The navigation bar at the bottom of the screen always provides information on the sample location currently shown. This includes the current magnification, the zoom factor, the focus level (if the current image contains focus stacks), and the Metafer coordinate of the window center. Quick access buttons allow for selecting a certain magnification, viewing the complete image, and accessing focus levels. Of course there is also a navigator toolbar showing a thumbnail of the whole image and an indicator of the current section.
Two annotation toolbars make it easy to highlight regions of interest. The ‘Scan Regions’ toolbar is used to prepare the next scan of a selected part of the sample. A quick selection of the target region generates an annotation file which is directly read by Metafer. The ‘Annotations’ toolbar then offers a comprehensive range of tools to annotate and highlight items in the image. If the current image originates from an object search in Metafer, it is even possible to visualize the detected objects within their original vicinity and to group them by any obtained analysis result.
The image window can be split into up to four coupled sections. With the ‘Channels’ toolbar it is then possible to assign different display parameters to each sub-window. Hence, it is possible to visualize the same part of the image with different color channels, overlays, and contrasts. Furthermore, it is possible to open two different images, e.g., from subsequent tissue sections, in two viewer software instances which can also be coupled for panning and zooming.
Any view can be exported into standard image file formats (TIFF, JPG, BMP, GIF) as a snapshot. Snapshots may contain additional data such as a magnification ruler, annotations, FOV indications, and even a comment. Additionally, extracts of the image can be interactively defined or by their coordinates, and they can then be saved as a separate image.