PathcoreScholar Release Notes

v2.2 (2025-07-07)

This release of PathcoreScholar includes a newly redesigned reporting system and the ability to apply weights to pages and modules. In addition, many bugs have been fixed to improve the security, stability, and usability of the software.

New Features

Improved Reporting

The reporting system has been redeveloped to provide instant export of class results, without refresh delays, and a new interface that provides concise reporting of individual and class statistics.

Educators can now quickly switch between seeing averages for an entire class, averages only for those students who responded, or the scores of a specific individual. The updated user interface shows which modules or pages are graded, the number of respondents, and the new weight values at a glance. And now Educators can even review individualized reports at the module and page levels.

All of these reports can be exported to CSV, including a new column to indicate when a page or module is graded.

Module and Page Weights

Pages and modules can now have their weight set by an Educator. A weight indicates the relative value of a page within a module, or a module within a class, and is used to calculate weighted averages for modules and classes. This replaces the previous weight values of graded pages which were automatically calculated from the total value of their questions giving Educators more control over the distribution of pages' values within a module.

Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM)

All PathcoreScholar deployments have been successfully migrated to Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM). This fully managed, geo-redundant storage solution reduces storage costs through intelligent auto-tiering, while maintaining high performance for heavy workloads and seamless data access. HSM is optimized for both active and archived resources, offering scalable and cost-effective storage for digital pathology.

Improvements

Security Improvements

  • Password reset requests are now rate limited

Educator Improvements

  • Minor improvements to the UI when adding a hidden data button to a page

Student Improvements

  • Number questions on non-graded pages now provide feedback to the student. The feedback includes whether their provided answer is correct and how many points it earned

Viewer Improvements

  • The name filter in the Viewer Browse Folder panel now supports wildcards (*)
  • Made a change to the Viewer that can improve rendering speed (e.g., while panning)

Repository Improvements

  • The name filter in the Repository now supports wildcards (*)

Fixed in this Release

Security Fixes

  • The user session is now invalidated on sign out by default
  • Secure session cookies are now enabled by default

Educator Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where cancelling the insertion of an image into a question could result in a "Something went wrong" error
  • It is no longer possible to add Educators to the list of students for a class
  • When navigating pages, modules, and classes using breadcrumbs, the currently selected tab is now preserved

Student Fixes

  • Fixed a bug where a Student could potentially view a page, module, or class in which they're not enrolled

Viewer Fixes

  • Corrected a problem where small or narrow snapshots would show the wrong region when previewed or rendered
  • Fixed a bug where rotation was not remembered after refresh
    • Rotation is now unique to each user and stored in the URL hash for sharing
  • Fixed an issue where the legacy snapshot downloader would produce a server error if the snapshot was rotated

Repository Fixes

  • Corrected a problem with downloads that limited the path to 100 characters or less resulting in truncated file names
  • Repository name filter (search bar) will now clear when navigating between folders

Image Format Fixes

  • Fixed an issue which could lead to a service disruption when processing certain types of corrupt Olympus images
  • Fixed an issue which could lead to a service disruption when processing Hamamastu images containing mixed brightfield and fluorescence
  • Fixed a problem which could lead to service degradation if a burst of requests for the same image arrived at the same time
  • Fixed a potential vulnerability in handling Sakura .svslide images
  • Fixed an issue where fluorescence sub-images might not display correctly if the first band is hidden
  • Fixed a problem where OME-TIFF sub-images were not laid out correctly if some defined positions and some didn't
  • Fixed a specific issue that could eventually lead to the Viewer being unable to display images, and added a more general mechanism to recover from similar errors

Notes

  • The order of the tabs in the class view for Educators has changed: the Students tab has moved to the end