Digital Staining of Pathological Images: Dye amount correction for improved classification performance

摘要

Physical staining is indispensable in pathology. While physical staining uses chemicals, "digital staining" exploits the differing spectral characteristics of the different tissue components to simulate the effect of physical staining. Digital staining for pathological images involves two basic processes: classification of tissue components and digital colorization whereby the classified tissue components are impressed with colors associated to their reaction to specific dyes. Spectral features, i.e. spectral transmittance, of the different tissue structures are dependent on the staining condition of the tissue slide. Thus, if the staining condition of the test image is different, classification result is affected, and the resulting digitally-stained image may not reflect the desired result. This paper shows that it is possible to obtain robust classification results by correcting the dye amount of each test-image pixel using Beer Lambert's Law. Also the effectiveness of such technique to be incorporated to the current digital staining scheme is investigated as well.