A past collaboration · no longer offered by X-WOW

X-WOW Slide Scanner

For a while, X-WOW offered a small kit that turned an ordinary lab microscope into a whole-slide scanner: a microscope camera plus scanning software. The software came from Microvisioneer, a German company. It was offered under the X-WOW name as part of a past collaboration, and X-WOW no longer offers it.

X-WOW has no current partnership with Microvisioneer.

How it worked

Move the slide by hand; the software stitches as you go

  1. Fit the camera to the microscope's C-mount port and connect it to a computer by USB 3.
  2. Choose the objective in the software and balance brightness and colour on an empty patch of glass.
  3. Move the slide in overlapping stripes. The live view grows into one stitched image; if the software loses its place, you move back slowly and carry on.
  4. Save the result as a pyramidal TIFF or SVS file and open it in a viewer such as the open-source QuPath.

From the old X-WOW setup guide. As an example, it gave a 5 × 5 mm area scanned at 40× as roughly 90 MB at 90% compression quality.

Why it mattered

A dedicated slide scanner costs more than many small labs can pay. Doing the moving by hand let a lab turn the microscope it already had into a scanner, and share whole slides with colleagues anywhere.

Malawi, 2019

In March 2019, X-WOW ran a fundraiser and bought a manual whole-slide imaging system, costing under £5,000: a "magic wand" for a paediatric cancer team in Malawi, so slides could be reviewed together with colleagues about 11,900 km (7,400 miles, as the old site put it) away.

Today · checked on 11 October 2026 cited

Who makes it now

Microvisioneer still makes this kind of software. On its website, its manual scanning product is called mvSlide: it upgrades an existing microscope that has a suitable camera into a manual slide scanner, stitching the image in real time. It also offers InstaSlide for sharing zoomable virtual slides and mvLive for sharing live camera images.

Product names and details are theirs and may change; their own website, microvisioneer.com, is the authority. Curious how X-WOW designs instruments now? See SWELL, a desk design that has never been built.