About the project¶
The Digital Slide Archive (DSA) is an open-source platform for storing, managing, visualizing, and annotating large microscopy images, with a focus on whole-slide digital pathology. It is built from Girder, large_image, HistomicsUI, Slicer CLI Web, and HistomicsTK. See What is DSA? for how the pieces fit together and System overview for the deployment model.
History¶
The project builds on the Cancer Digital Slide Archive (CDSA), a public site that hosts whole-slide images associated with The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). At more than 10,000 images and 20 terabytes, the CDSA supported TCGA Analysis Working Group studies and other investigator-driven work. DSA packages that experience as software that any lab can run for its own data. The success stories describe both efforts.
License¶
The Digital Slide Archive is released under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
Funding¶
This work was funded in part by NIH grant U24-CA194362-01.
Community¶
- GitHub Discussions — questions, ideas, and show-and-tell.
- GitHub Issues — bug reports and feature requests.
- YouTube channel — talks and demonstrations.
- Contact Kitware — commercial support and collaboration.
Collaborators¶
| Organization | Contributor | Role |
|---|---|---|
| Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University | Lee A.D. Cooper, PhD | HistomicsTK lead |
| Emory University School of Medicine | David A. Gutman, MD, PhD | Digital Slide Archive lead |
| Kitware, Inc. | David Manthey | Software engineering and deployment |
Roles and affiliations are reproduced from the upstream project website on 2026-11-01; confirm current details with the project before quoting them.
How to cite¶
If you use DSA in published work, cite:
Gutman, David A., Mohammed Khalilia, Sanghoon Lee, Michael Nalisnik, Zach Mullen, Jonathan Beezley, Deepak R. Chittajallu, David Manthey, and Lee A.D. Cooper. “The Digital Slide Archive: A Software Platform for Management, Integration, and Analysis of Histology for Cancer Research.” Cancer Research 77, no. 21 (October 31, 2017): e75–78. doi:10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-17-0629
More references are on the papers and publications page.
This documentation site¶
This site is maintained in
Gutman-Lab/dsa-docs. It is a
consolidation area: some pages replicate material that still lives upstream,
and SOURCES.md
records where each page came from. The upstream project website remains
https://digitalslidearchive.github.io/digital_slide_archive/.