The Northern Ireland Virtual Tissue  Archive (NIVTA) is a new initiative funded by the HPSS R&D Office,                 Queen's University Belfast and supported by Hewlett Packard. 

This will establish a pan European  network for virtual tissue archiving aimed at supporting clinical trials,biomarker research, tissue microarray analysis and virtual slide based education.

Housed within Queen's University's  Bioimaging Core Technology Unit, NIVTA has state-of-the- art digital scanning systems including an Aperio CS system, Aperio OS system( one of only two currently available in Europe) and a Hamamatsu system with fluorescent scanning capability.