My Approach
When I joined Aperio—later acquired by Danaher and merged into Leica Biosystems—it was primarily a hardware company with a fledgling web-based microscope built on a modified version of Zoomify, written in ActionScript 1.0. I was brought in to reverse-engineer features from their thick-client application (written in C++ and Visual Basic) into the existing web viewer. The goal was to ensure seamless transitions for users across platforms and reduce the burden of retraining or additional documentation.
Identifying Unique Challenges
The tech stack presented a serious challenge. ActionScript 1.0 was outdated, and finding developers willing to extend or support it was nearly impossible. At the time, jQuery had just emerged, and the idea of a “zero-footprint” viewer (fully web-based, no plugins) was met with skepticism by a hardware-centric engineering team.
As the company matured, it reached a critical turning point: transitioning from startup survival to profitability and scalability. This required a full digital transformation—shifting from CapEx to OpEx, on-prem to cloud—and pivoting from our core Life Sciences innovators to the more demanding personas of clinical healthcare pathologists.
Resolving Complex Problems
To gain market traction in healthcare, Aperio split into two business units: Life Sciences and Healthcare. Our team dove deep into the workflows and constraints of clinical pathologists, shadowing them during rounds, meetings, and frozen section procedures (slides created during surgery).
One major insight: clinical pathologists couldn’t install software or runtimes on their machines—everything needed to work in the browser. This uncovered a clear market need for a true web-based whole slide image (WSI) viewer that could integrate with the hospital’s LIS (Laboratory Information System), where they accessed patient histories and prior slides.
User-Centric Design
Our research revealed that many features we’d been building were irrelevant to the end users. Pathologists didn’t care about scan time or image compression—that was the concern of lab techs. What they needed was simple: the ability to launch digital slides directly from the LIS in real time, without losing context.
Instead of continuing to port over every legacy feature, I pivoted the strategy:
I designed an abstraction layer that allowed our viewer—or any third-party viewer—to load seamlessly from within the LIS. This broke down collaboration barriers with previously inaccessible LIS engineering teams and created the interoperability that the market was missing. That same approach later influenced the creation of Google Cloud’s WSI API.
Outcome
To communicate this shift to internal teams, I built a prototype over a weekend. It proved pivotal—not just in clarifying our direction, but in unifying product, engineering, and executive leadership around a common goal. It became a cornerstone in Aperio’s acquisition by Danaher and helped establish what is now recognized as the digital pathology market.
Nearly a decade later, the FDA approved digital pathology for primary diagnosis in the U.S.—a milestone that validates the vision we set into motion.
Sometimes, crossing the chasm from early adopters to mass adoption means going back to square one—relearning your users, rethinking your priorities, and redesigning the future.
