Aperio Technologies, the leading provider of virtual microscopy systems, and Roper Scientific, Inc.'s Photometrics division have completed a distribution agreement whereby Nippon Roper, Roper's Japanese subsidiary, will exclusively market and support Aperio's line of ScanScope Systems in Japan and China.

Nippon Roper currently distributes imaging solutions from leading companies including Photometrics, Princeton Instruments/Acton, Q-Imaging, Media Cybernetics and Optical Insights. Aperio's ScanScope Systems-microscope slide scanners for ultra-fast entire-slide digitization, and software for viewing, managing and analyzing digital slides-strengthen Nippon Roper's offering in Pathology, said Tom Connelly, president of Roper Scientific's Advanced Microscopy business unit.

"This partnership supports our strategic focus on Advanced Microscopy and Pathology," Connelly said adding, "Aperio is the leader in virtual microscopy and has by far the largest installed base of products worldwide. We are pleased to market and service Aperio's latest generation of ScanScope Systems in Japan and China. We expect virtual microscopy to be extremely helpful to a medical community in which the relative number of pathologists is significantly lower than in other parts of the world."

Virtual microscopy is the practice of converting entire glass microscope slides to high resolution digital slides-entire-slide images that can be remotely viewed, quantitatively analyzed, and readily annotated, shared and managed, all without a traditional microscope. Aperio's line of ScanScope Systems delivers automated high-speed digital slide creation, management, and analysis for pathology. Archival and retrieval, quality assurance, frozen section interpretation, secondary consultations, and entire-slide image analysis are all improved with the ScanScope System.