Assessing color performance of whole-slide imaging scanners for digital pathology

Abstract

The color performance of two commercial whole-slide imaging (WSI) scanners was compared against the ground truth and a hypothetical monochrome scanner. Three biological tissue slides were used to test the WSI scanners. A multispectral imaging system was developed to obtain the color truth of the biological tissue slides at the pixel level. The hypothetical monochrome scanner was derived from the color truth as a lower bound for comparison. The CIEDE2000 formula was used to measure color errors. Results show that color errors generated by the modern commercial WSI scanner, the legacy commercial WSI scanner, and the monochrome WSI scanner are in the range of [8.4, 13.0], [18.0, 26.33], and [17.4, 17.6] ΔE00, respectively. The legacy commercial WSI scanner was outperformed by not only the modern commercial WSI scanner but also by the hypothetical monochrome scanner.