Automatic quality evaluation of whole slide images for the practical use of whole slide imaging scanner

Abstract

A whole slide imaging (WSI) scanner scans pathological-specimens to produce digital images for monitor-based diagnosis and analysis. However, the image quality is sometimes insufficient due to focus-error or noise, in which case the slide needs to be rescanned. In previous work, a referenceless quality evaluation technique was proposed, but some artifacts (i.e. tissue-fold, air-bubble) were detected as false positives. Those artifacts need to be ignored in determining whether rescanning is necessary or not, because they are not caused in the scanning but slide preparation stage. This paper proposes a method for a more practical system to assess WSI quality by distinguishing the origins of quality degradation; the focus-error or noise caused by the scanner and the artifact occurred in the slide preparation. In the method, a support vector machine detects artifacts first, and then quality is evaluated excluding artifact regions. The effectiveness of the proposed system has been experimentally demonstrated.