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1. Introduction

The Real Time Picture Processor (RTPP) was one of the first special-purpose hardware computers developed for grayscale image processing and was designed to aid in biological image analysis. It was developed at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

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Lew's solution was to view the slide as an array, a 2-dimensional (2D) matrix where each visible area had a unique 2-dimensional address on the slide. The sections were very thin so that all the grains at a location were visible; the Z-axis in this case could be ignored. Lew's system used a list of random number XY positions, which were applied to each slide. Dr. Vinichaichol would go to these areas and count whatever grains were there. If there were no cells, there were zero counts. And suddenly everything fell together. The new method was what Dr. Fitzgerald needed. This result was published in 1968 in the American Journal of PathologyPathology Fitzgerald, P. et.al., 53(6):953-970, "Pancreatic acinar cell regeneration. V. Analysis of variance of the autoradiographic labeling index (thymidine-H3)."

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One of the unique aspects of the RTPP was to implement the design as special-purpose parallel hardware with a flexible bus-architecture and a microcoded instruction set that reflected the types of operations routinely performed in image processing [3-4, TR-2, TR-7, TR-7a, TR-22]. Although other image processing computers were available, such as the ILLIAC-III , using a microcode architecture enabled an image processor to be constructed and built less expensively but with greater flexibility than building it entirely with discrete hardware. The special-purpose hardware could make real-time results possible (defined as reasonably fast enough to incorporate human feedback in tuning algorithms, such as interactively adjusting detection thresholds, etc.). A National Technical Information Service (NTIS)technical report [TR-7] describing the RTPP was one of the frequently requested reports one month as reported in their monthly newsletter for November 1976 under computer topics.

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