Abstract
The work in this study proposes to deal with microscope images with slightly misaligned stages. A sliding template-based method for position-based whole slide microscopy (WSM) image stitching is proposed to find the translational properties of the consecutive images. The mechanical stability of the stage is one of the major issues, along with flat field disturbances that make the image stitching process difficult. This calls for further research in the field of image stitching. The proposed method employs a sliding template (a small image) to find the translational offset with the adjacent images, which is fast enough to avoid the complicated feature detection and matching algorithms to measure the distances between the features of all the images. The results of the proposed work show comparably accurate stitching while being more resistant to mechanical instability as well as faster than other methods. For slightly misaligned stages, position-based WSM image stitching using a sliding template can be a viable solution.
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The datasets are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Funding
This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea(NRF), funded by the Ministry of Education(2021R1I1A3061025). This research was supported by the Korea Medical Device Development Fund grant funded by the Korean government (the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy, the Ministry of Health & Welfare, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety) (Project Number: 1711174449, RS-2020-KD000024).
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V.S.B. proposed the idea and implementation and wrote the main article, Y.P. experimental setup troubleshooting J.B.E. supervised the project All authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Approval was granted by the Experimental Animal Steering Committee of Dankook University (DKU-23-008).
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Bhadouria, V.S., Park, Yr. & Eom, J.B. A sliding template-based approach for position-based whole slide microscopy image stitching for slightly unaligned stages. SIViP 18, 2597–2605 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-023-02933-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-023-02933-0