Observation at the microscope is basic and crucial to patient care and the most time consuming of medical image examinations tasks. There is a clear and urgent need to make these examinations faster, more reproducible and objective. The HOME microscope workstation presented here proposed to provide the pathologists, cytotechnicians and the laboratory manager with the necessary tools to : facilitate the conventional tasks at the microscope, interface cell and tissue image processing facilities in daily routine work, and integrate the microscopes in a network compatible with the computer infrastructure of clinical pathology laboratories. The innovation is to project the computer images, graphics and alpha-numeric instructions into the microscope optical image itself, which then becomes an addressable bitmap system. Neither the alterations to the microscope nor the PC housed under the workstation are apparent and the keyboard has been replaced by a mouse. Thus, a computer innocent cytotechnician or pathologist can use it to : drive the microscope stage, select the desired application program, select the type of measurement to be performed without having to look up from the microscope. Several prototypes have already been developped by Carl ZEISS (Germany) and LEICA (Germany). Typical application software packages for cervical cancer screening and assistance to myopathies diagnostic are now available.