Micro-CT guided 3D reconstruction of histological images

Abstract

Histological images are very important for diagnosis of cancer and other diseases. However, during the preparation of the histological slides for microscopy, the 3D information of the tissue specimen gets lost. Therefore, many 3D reconstruction methods for histological images have been proposed. However, most approaches rely on the histological 2D images alone, which makes 3D reconstruction difficult due to the large deformations introduced by cutting and preparing the histological slides. In this work, we propose an image-guided approach to 3D reconstruction of histological images. Before histological preparation of the slides, the specimen is imaged using X-ray microtomography (micro CT). We can then align each histological image back to the micro CT image utilizing non-rigid registration. Our registration results show that our method can provide smooth 3D reconstructions with micro CT guidance.