Jean-Marie Ramirez digitizes histology

Recently, the histologist invited us to discover a real treasure in one of the practical work rooms on the top floor of the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier. In a wooden box carefully placed at the back of an old cabinet, human tissue collected over the years is now preserved on dozens of glass slides...

Free access

With the support of DSIN—and particularly educational engineer Agathe Hubert—Jean-Marie Ramirez decided a year ago to digitize this fragile historical and scientific heritage by creating France's first educational website featuring virtual histology slides. The colorful, richly illustrated website is now freely accessible on the University of Montpellier server. "Open to doctors, students, researchers, and anyone with an interest in how the body works, the site is unique in that it combines histology, the science of biological tissues, and anatomy, the science of the structure of living beings," explainsProfessor.
On the site's home page, images of the male and female bodies lead to the visualization of healthy tissue slides specific to each of our organs in just a few clicks. Accompanied by a detailed description, each slide is also accompanied by a schematic representation and an interpretation of its main structures.
This is an invaluable source of information, particularly for first- and second-year medical students, whose practical work in histology and cell biology is still carried out using microscopes but will soon be completely virtualized thanks to this new website, both at the Faculty of Medicine in Montpellier and at other faculties in France and abroad.

100% human

"Obtaining fresh human tissue samples is very complicated today, so histology is generally taught using animal tissue," explains Jean-Marie Ramirez, whose website is unique in that it presents 100% human histological slides.
In collaboration with Montpellier University Hospital, histology recently joined forces with pathological anatomy to create the largest site of virtual human slides available on the web. At the origin of this new shift in histology is Jean-Marie Ramirez, who, at the age of 42, has just created his own cancer research group. A few weeks ago, with the support of Agathe Hubert and Vanessa Szablewski, a pathologist at Montpellier University Hospital, he began digitizing human pathological anatomy slides. The first digitized tissues (malignant and benign tumors and non-tumor pathologies) were put online in October and are now accessible to the general public. This first website dedicated to histology and pathological anatomy, created from 100% human tissue and accessible free of charge on the internet, is a world first.