Accurate and Robust Alignment of Variable-stained Histologic Images Using a General-purpose Greedy Diffeomorphic Registration Tool
This work addresses a domain-specific challenge for pathologists by enabling better evaluation of sequential slides, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing registration methods.
The paper tackles the problem of aligning variably stained histologic images to improve spatial analysis of tissue samples, presenting a two-step diffeomorphic registration approach that achieves accurate and robust alignment.
Variously stained histology slices are routinely used by pathologists to assess extracted tissue samples from various anatomical sites and determine the presence or extent of a disease. Evaluation of sequential slides is expected to enable a better understanding of the spatial arrangement and growth patterns of cells and vessels. In this paper we present a practical two-step approach based on diffeomorphic registration to align digitized sequential histopathology stained slides to each other, starting with an initial affine step followed by the estimation of a detailed deformation field.