Virtual microscopy can improve the workflow of modern pathology laboratories, a goal limited by the large size of the virtual slides (VS). Lately, determination of the Regions of Interest has shown to be useful in navigation and compression tasks. This work presents a novel method for establishing RoIs in VS, based on a relevance score calculated from example images selected by pathologist. The process starts by splitting the Virtual Slide (VS) into a grid of blocks, each represented by a set of low level features which aim to capture the very basic visual properties, namely, color, intensity, orientation and texture. The expert selects then two blocks i.e. A typical relevant (irrelevant) instance. Different similarity (disimilarity) maps are then constructed, using these positive (negative) examples. The obtained maps are then integrated by a normalization process that promotes maps with a similarity global maxima that largely exceeds the average local maxima. Each image region is thus entailed with an associated score, established by the number of closest positive (negative) blocks, whereby any block has also an associated score. Evaluation was carried out using 8 VS from different tissues, upon which a group of three pathologists had navigated. Precision-recall measurements were calculated at each step of any actual navigation, obtaining an average precision of 55% and a recall of about 38% when using the available set of navigations.
Blind source separation methods aim to split information into the original sources. In histology, each dye component attempts to specifically characterize different microscopic structures. In the case of the hematoxylin-eosin stain, universally used for routine examination, quantitative analysis may often require the inspection of different morphological signatures related mainly to nuclei patterns, but also to stroma distribution. Stain separation is usually a preprocessing operation that is transversal to different applications. This paper presents a novel colour separation method that finds the hematoxylin and eosin clusters by projecting the whole (r,g,b) space to a folded surface connecting the distributions of a series of [(r-b),g] planes that divide the cloud of H&E tones. The proposed method produces density maps closer to those obtained with the colour mixing matrices set by an expert, when comparing with the density maps obtained using nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF), independent component analysis (ICA) and a state-of-the-art method. The method has outperformed three baseline methods, NMF, Macenko and ICA, in about 8%, 12% and 52% for the eosin component, whereas this was about 4%, 8% and 26% for the hematoxylin component.
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