Jean-Marie Ramirez digitizes histology

" On this blade, you have the eye. An eye taken from one of Montpellier's last death row inmates, publicly executed under the Third Republic on Place Albert 1er," explains Jean-Marie Ramirez, his eyes resting on the scope of his microscope.

Recently, the histologist invited us to discover a veritable treasure trove, in one of the TP rooms on the top floor of Montpellier's Faculty of Medicine. In a wooden box carefully placed at the back of an old cupboard, human tissues collected over the ages are now recorded on dozens of glass slides...

Free access

With the support of the DSIN - and in particular of 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 of virtual histology slides. This colorful, abundantly illustrated website is now freely accessible on the University of Montpellier's 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 beings", explains the teacher-researcher.
On the site's home page, representations of the male and female bodies lead in just a few clicks to the visualization of healthy tissue slides specific to each of our organs. Each slide is accompanied by a detailed description, 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 carried out under the microscope, but will soon be able to be totally virtualized thanks to this new website, both at the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine and at other faculties in France and abroad.

100% human

"Today, it's very difficult to obtain fresh human sections, so histology is generally taught using animal tissues", explains Jean-Marie Ramirez, whose website features 100% human histological slides.
In collaboration with Montpellier University Hospital, histology recently joined forces with pathological anatomy to form the largest virtual human slide site available on the web. Jean-Marie Ramirez, who at the age of 42 has just set up his own cancer research group, is at the origin of this new mutation in histology. 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-tumoral pathologies) were put online in October and are now available to the general public. This first histology and pathological anatomy website, based on 100% human tissue and freely accessible on the web, is a world first.