e-Learning has been advocated since the 1960s, and over the years as web and multimedia technologies becomes mature, e-Learning becomes more popular and contents are more rich and interesting.
One of the key advantages of e-Learning is the flexibility, learner can access the contents anywhere where internet connections are available. These are more convenient for the learners because they can arrange their own schedule and commitments to study [1].
1.1 Motivations
Current teaching style of pathology in university (for example National Yang-Ming University) requires many copies of glass slides and high magnification microscopes causing following issues:
1. Students will need to take turns to borrow pathology slides. There are limited number of glass slides, because the process of making glass slides are complicated, time consuming, and high cost.
2. After students have access to glass slides they will also need to get access to a high magnification microscope in order to see the contents on the glass slide and writing notes down.
3. High magnification microscope is an expensive hardware and the numbers are limited. Current method of teaching this course requires large investments on equipments and the result is limited.
4. In the current teaching environment, lecturer will need to use a microscope to teach students the diagnosis of the slides. And it will be very difficult for students to identify the exact location of the diagnosis on the slides, when the try to operate the microscope themselves.
Existing virtual slide systems have been published overseas, but these types of system only allowed user to zooming and panning on the slide. For this to become useful materials in teaching, it requires professors or teachers who are specialized in this field to annotate their diagnosis at the appropriate location on the slide. Therefore how to develop a user friendly multimedia authoring system for medical specialists is the primary objective of this research.
Examining existing multimedia authoring systems, most of them are based on
create teaching materials, it will require intensive training for medical specialists on how to programming using Action Script language. This will be very inconvenient for medical specialists to perform annotations on teaching materials. Therefore in this research, we extend the existing multimedia authoring system to incorporate new features to suit for medical specialists to perform annotations on digitalized image.
In current virtual slides systems, they required proprietary plug-in to view the slides, which will cause an issue in different platforms, and it will limit the expansion of the system for other usages. And after few years later the plug-in might not work in the future platforms
1.2 Goals
In this research, we will propose a new methodology that solves the above issues. We will apply the methodology in a pathology virtual slide system for digitalized pathology information. After the completion of this system, it can be used to improve students’ learning experience in pathology, students can use internet to access the constructed virtual slide system to select appropriate pathology slides that have been digitalized and well documented for self paced study without the need of accessing actual slides and microscope. Potential advantages of using virtual slide system include:
1. Provides new style of learning for students without the restriction imposed by glass slides and microscope equipments. Students can access the virtual slide system from any computers with internet connection at any time, and any place.
2. Save the resource for purchasing expensive microscope equipments and artificially making large amounts of same glass slides.
3. Hazard from inappropriate operating of microscope and making slides.
4. Students can schedule their own learning activity easily and freely.
The constructed virtual slides system will be implemented in standard protocols and languages, which means there will be no proprietary plug-in required, which accounts for heterogeneous environments and future expansions. And the system can expand it’s usages with other systems. For example, a web-based pathology report system.
1.3 Research methodology
In this research, we will propose a new methodology, therefore we need to study existing systems to design our system’s architecture and requirements.
We conduct this research work in the following steps:
Step 1. Study existing systems then analyze their advantages and drawbacks.
Step 2. Propose a new methodology that overcomes the limitations of existing system.
Step 3. Analyze the functionalities and requirements of the system in order to support our methodology.
Step 4. Implements the system, depending on the sub-systems different language and tools will be used.
Step 5. Evaluate the system in actual teaching environment.
Step 6. Concludes the thesis and suggestions for future improvements
1.4 Organization of this thesis
Chapter 1: This chapter will give an overview of the thesis and the motivations.
Chapter 2: Study the related work from previous papers or thesis. At the end of this chapter, we analyze the advantages and limitations of previous systems.
Chapter 3: Propose a new methodology that overcomes the limitations imposed in previous systems. We will also add new functionalities to our proposed system.
Chapter 4: An overview of the proposed system’s architecture, system flow of the proposed system, and details of each sub-system.
Chapter 5: Examples of using our proposed methodology and system, such as medical pathology slides and GPS navigation map.
Chapter 6: In this chapter, we present the conclusions for this research and future works.