ImageBox3: No-Server Tile Serving to Traverse Whole Slide Images on the Web

Whole slide imaging (WSI) has become the primary modality for digital pathology data. However, due to the size and high-resolution nature of these images, they are generally only accessed in smaller sections or tiles via specialized platforms, most of which require extensive setup and/or costly infrastructure. These platforms typically also need a copy of the images to be locally available to them, potentially causing issues with data governance and provenance. To address these concerns, we developed ImageBox3, an in-browser tiling mechanism to enable zero-footprint traversal of remote WSI data. All computation is performed client-side without compromising user governance, operating public and private images alike as long as the storage service supports HTTP range requests (standard in Cloud storage and most web servers). ImageBox3 thus removes significant hurdles to WSI operation and effective collaboration, allowing for the sort of democratized analytical tools needed to establish participative, FAIR digital pathology data commons. Availability: code - https://github.com/episphere/imagebox3; fig1 (live) - https://episphere.github.io/imagebox3/demo/scriptTag ; fig2 (live) - https://episphere.github.io/imagebox3/demo/serviceWorker ; fig 3 (live) - https://observablehq.com/@prafulb/imagebox3-in-observable .