Multispectral Whole Slide Imaging System
Mitsuyoshi, Tashiro ; Tokyo Institute of Technology;
Content:
Applications of multispectral imaging such as quantification of dye amount, adjustment of stain condition, digital stain and color enhancement processing have been developed for pathological diagnosis support. Recently, whole slide imaging (WSI) has been widely promoted and is expected to be installed for pathological image analysis based on multispectral information.
Technology:
A multispectral image (MSI) is one of the spectral images captured by using N color filters, N>3, where each image pixel contains spectral information that can be used for image analysis. Apparently the data size of a MSI is bigger than that of a RGB color image. In addition, there is a need for conversion processing to display a MSI as a color image for ordinary observation. For this reason, it is difficult to implement an interactive WSI simply by replacing the stored RGB images by MSIs.
Design:
To address the setback in implementing an interactive WSI, we proposed the following system. Firstly, the equivalent RGB image and other spectral information extracted from MSI are saved in the server separately. The RGB images are used for ordinary observation of the image data and the additional spectral information is only sent when detailed image analysis is needed. This process therefore enables the implementation of multispectral analysis.
Results:
We implemented the adjustment of stain condition of Hematoxylin and Eosin stained images through MSI processing using the additional spectral information. In this case, we ensured the fast implementation of dye adjustment by modifying the saving format of the additional spectral information.
Conclusion:
We proposed a multispectral WSI that enables the application of image processing techniques based on spectral information. In our future work, we would evaluate other image processing applications, i.e. digital staining, color enhancement, and examine the compression ratio and accuracy of the results using additional information.
