Jean-Marie Ramirez is digitizing histology

Recently, the histologist invited us to discover a veritable treasure in one of the lab rooms on the top floor of the Montpellier School of Medicine. Inside a wooden box carefully tucked away at the back of an old cabinet, human tissue samples collected over the years are now preserved on dozens of glass slides…

Free access

With the support of the DSIN—and particularly educational engineer Agathe Hubert—Jean-Marie Ramirez decided a year ago to digitize this fragile heritage, both historical and scientific, by creating France’s first educational website featuring virtual histology slides. A colorful, richly illustrated website that is now freely accessible on the University of Montpellier’s server. “Open to doctors, students, researchers, and anyone with even a passing interest in how the body works, the site is unique in that it combines histology—the science of biological tissues—with anatomy—the science of the structure of living beings,” explainsProfessor.
On the site’s homepage, images of male and female bodies allow users to view, with just a few clicks, slides of healthy tissue specific to each of our organs. Accompanied by a detailed description, each slide also features a schematic representation and an interpretation of its main structures.
An invaluable source of information, particularly for first- and second-year medical students, where practical work in histology and cell biology is still conducted under a microscope but will soon—at the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine as well as at other faculties in France and abroad—be fully virtualized thanks to this new website.

100% human

“Since obtaining fresh human tissue sections is very difficult today, histology is generally taught using animal tissue,” explains Jean-Marie Ramirez, whose website is unique in that it features 100% human histology slides.
In collaboration with the Montpellier University Hospital, the histology department recently joined forces with the pathological anatomy department to create the largest collection of virtual human slides available on the web. At the forefront of this new shift in histology is Jean-Marie Ramirez, who, at age 42, has just established his own cancer research group. A few weeks ago, with the support of Agathe Hubert and Vanessa Szablewski—a pathologist at the Montpellier University Hospital—he began digitizing human pathological anatomy slides. The first digitized tissues (malignant and benign tumors, as well as non-tumor pathologies) were thus posted online in October and are now accessible to the general public. This first website dedicated to histology and pathological anatomy, created entirely from human tissues and freely accessible online, is a world first.