HISTOBREAST, a collection of brightfield microscopy images of Haematoxylin and Eosin stained breast tissue

Abstract

Modern histopathology workflows rely on the digitization of histology slides. The quality of the resulting digital representations, in the form of histology slide image mosaics, depends on various specific acquisition conditions and on the image processing steps that underlie the generation of the final mosaic, e.g. registration and blending of the contained image tiles. We introduce HISTOBREAST, an extensive collection of brightfield microscopy images that we collected in a principled manner under different acquisition conditions on Haematoxylin - Eosin (H&E) stained breast tissue. HISTOBREAST is comprised of neighbour image tiles and ensemble of mosaics composed from different combinations of the available image tiles, exhibiting progressively degraded quality levels. HISTOBREAST can be used to benchmark image processing and computer vision techniques with respect to their robustness to image modifications specific to brightfield microscopy of H&E stained tissues. Furthermore, HISTOBREAST can serve in the development of new image processing methods, with the purpose of ensuring robustness to typical image artefacts that raise interpretation problems for expert histopathologists and affect the results of computerized image analysis.