Skip to main content

Collaborative Biomedical Imaging

This initiative focused on developing an enhanced method for biomedical teachers and students to collaboratively mark up digital slides.

  • User Research
  • UX Design
  • Interface Design
  • Front End Development
The web application showing a selected user annotation.

Bringing it together

Educators required an improved method for fostering group collaboration through slide annotations. Prior to this endeavor, only one user could annotate a layer, posing challenges for collective learner engagement.

To address this, we introduced a feature that lets users invite others to a layer, enabling them to view peers' annotations and contribute their own.

The layers sidebar design, now with user profiles.
Multiple user annotations on a shared layer.

Improving the experience

A problem we heard about often from users was that it was difficult to find images they had previously seen or worked on. To address this, we introduced a new tab that lists all previously annotated slides. Additionally, we added the ability to favorite slides, so if users discover an intriguing slide they want to annotate later, they can effortlessly save it to their account using the 'favorite' option.

The new My Slides tab in slice, showing annotated and favorited slides.
An annotation preview popover with statistics for shape perimeter and area.

Meaningful details

Marking and annotating regions on high-resolution biomedical images is the central feature of the app, and it was simple to become disoriented or lose perspective when focusing on details. Incorporating measurements for the perimeter and area of an annotation not only conveyed the overall scale of the image but also illustrated how substantial the annotated feature is in relation.

Project outcomes

Real-time joint annotation enhanced teamwork among learners, making group tasks smoother with the introduction of the shared layers capability. Students expressed that they appreciated collaborating and observing others' contributions, praising the application's interactivity and user-friendliness.

Students at the University of New South Wales using the new collaborative annotation features