As many of you already know, I am currently living deep in the West Indies on a small island called Dominica. I am living here with my girlfriend who goes to the medical school on the island. It is a really beautiful place to live and a very relaxing environment.

However, whenever we go out we invariably end up hanging out with other medical students who all really love to talk about med school and exams and diseases. It at times can get a little redundant.

Last night I got to talking with one of the pathology professors about digital imaging in the health care industry. It was actually a pretty fun conversation and I got a chance to “geek-out” for once on a subject I know pretty well.

It turns out the professor was trying to come up with a good way to teach the students pathology using digital technology. We talked all about the differences between the old-school method of just viewing a pathology slide directly in the microscope and todays more common method of imaging that slide with a digital camera and looking at it on a computer. It was pretty interesting conversation. We covered image compression, digital image processing and all sorts of topics from digital cameras to microscope objectives.

Afterwards it occurred to me that Aperture might be just the tool he is looking for. He wants to be able to set up something in the classroom that he can use to demonstrate, in a real-time manner, the method by which you prepare a pathology slide, image it, and search for the area of interest.

He has a very expensive Olympus microscope and a camera mount. So, I am thinking that all he needs to do is to bring in a laptop and set up a tethered shooting system between Aperture and the Olympus.

This way he could demonstrate to the students all at once how to prepare the slide in the scope, take the image and in Aperture he could use the loop tool to search through the image for the area of interest.

He could also quickly use Aperture’s adjustment HUD to adjust the exposure and contrast for each image, and he could easily tag each image with keywords to label what each slide is of.

In fact, if the Olympus camera he chooses has the live view mode he could even display the slide, live on the monitor before he snaps the image. Later he could export the images as Jpegs so that the students could take them home and to study.

There is a whole host of options here that Aperture could provide in the classroom. I can see him using the dual-monitor mode to be able to show full screen images of the slides, as well as the three-up mode to compare slides. If you have any other ideas for teaching aids using Aperture, please let me know.

Next time we meet up at the cafe I am going to bring my laptop and Aperture and show him what he can do!