Microscopy system having automatic and interactive modes for forming a magnified mosaic image and associated method

A method of creating a virtual slide, comprising:

• continuously capturing a plurality of discrete images of respective portions of a slide with an image capturing device configured to capture each image as a discrete multi-pixel area representation of the corresponding portion of the slide;
• scanning the slide with the image capturing device, commensurately with capturing the plurality of images of respective portions of the slide, in a first scan direction along the slide such that successive images of the plurality of images overlap by a first selected number of pixels in the first scan direction and form a first scanning band;
• scanning the slide with the image capturing device, commensurately with capturing the plurality of images of respective portions of the slide, in a second scan direction along the slide such that successive images of the plurality of images overlap in the second scan direction and form a second scanning band, the slide being scanned in the second direction such that the second scanning band overlaps with the first scanning band by a second selected number of pixels;
• and
• combining the overlapping plurality of images in the first and second scanning bands so as to form a single contiguous virtual image of the portions of the slide scanned by the image capturing device.

A method of forming a virtual slide from a plurality of images comprising a plurality of discrete groups of merged and connected images spaced apart from each other by a plurality of non-correlatable and unmergeable images, comprising:

• forming a grid of best estimate orthogonal coordinate pairs for each of the plurality of images, based on an average effective image dimension;
• placing each of the non-correlatable and unmergeable images onto the grid at a position corresponding to the best estimate coordinate pair therefor;
• sorting the groups of merged and connected images in ascending order according to the amount of images comprising the respective group;
• and
• placing the groups onto the grid, beginning with the group having the smallest amount of images therein and proceeding to the group having the largest amount of images therein, so as to form the virtual slide.