tissueloc: Whole slide digital pathology image tissue localization

Abstract

tissueloc is an open-source Python package for fast and accurate tissue localization on whole slide image (WSI). Automatic pathology diagnosis using WSI gradually becomes a research hotspot in biomedical imaging domain (Cruz-Roa et al., 2014, Barker, Hoogi, Depeursinge, & Rubin (2016)). Because of the gigabyte size of WSI, instead of directly taking the WSI as input, patch-based strategy is commonly used to deal with WSI (Cruz-Roa et al., 2014, Hou et al. (2016)). As there are large amounts of background regions that are useless for diagnosis, researchers working on automatic WSI diagnosis can utilize tissueloc to locate genuine tissue regions and focus their analysis on these regions.