openslide ☆

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Description:
C library to read whole-slide images (a.k.a. virtual slides)

Type: Formula | Tracked Since: Dec 28, 2025

Links: Homepage | formulae.brew.sh

Category: Other

Tags: imaging pathology c-library scientific-computing virtual-slide

Install: brew install openslide

About:
Openslide is a high-performance C library designed for reading and processing whole-slide images, commonly known as virtual slides, used in digital pathology. It provides a uniform API to access data from proprietary file formats like Aperio, Hamamatsu, and Leica, abstracting away format-specific complexities. This enables developers to build web-based viewers and image analysis tools that can efficiently handle massive, multi-gigapixel image files.

Key Features:

Supports multiple proprietary whole-slide image formats
Provides a simple, stable C API with bindings for Python, Java, and Go
Optimized for efficient region-based access to large image files
Open-source with an active community and robust documentation

Use Cases:

Developing web-based viewers for digital pathology slides
Integrating whole-slide image support into scientific image analysis pipelines
Building telepathology and remote diagnosis platforms

Alternatives:

VIPS (libvips) – VIPS is a general-purpose image processing library that is faster for some operations but lacks the specific high-level abstractions for proprietary WSI formats that Openslide provides.
OpenCV – OpenCV is a broad computer vision library not specifically designed for the tiled, multi-resolution pyramidal format of whole-slide images, making it less efficient for this use case.

Version History

Detected	Rev	Change	Commit
Jun 8, 2026 5:48pm	0	REVISION_ONLY	6c1fe1a4
Sep 14, 2025 8:45pm	0	VERSION_BUMP	e96258d1
Dec 26, 2022 4:23am	7	VERSION_BUMP	8409e0c2