SlideRunner - A Tool for Massive Cell Annotations in Whole Slide Images
This tool addresses the tedious annotation process for pathologists and researchers in digital histopathology, though it is incremental as it builds on existing annotation software solutions.
The authors tackled the problem of inefficient cell annotation in whole-slide histology images by introducing SlideRunner, an open-source tool that enables fast, single-click annotations and blind multi-annotations, developed with pathologists to facilitate larger databases for tasks like mitosis detection.
Large-scale image data such as digital whole-slide histology images pose a challenging task at annotation software solutions. Today, a number of good solutions with varying scopes exist. For cell annotation, however, we find that many do not match the prerequisites for fast annotations. Especially in the field of mitosis detection, it is assumed that detection accuracy could significantly benefit from larger annotation databases that are currently however very troublesome to produce. Further, multiple independent (blind) expert labels are a big asset for such databases, yet there is currently no tool for this kind of annotation available. To ease this tedious process of expert annotation and grading, we introduce SlideRunner, an open source annotation and visualization tool for digital histopathology, developed in close cooperation with two pathologists. SlideRunner is capable of setting annotations like object centers (for e.g. cells) as well as object boundaries (e.g. for tumor outlines). It provides single-click annotations as well as a blind mode for multi-annotations, where the expert is directly shown the microscopy image containing the cells that he has not yet rated.