Practical image quality evaluation for whole slide imaging scanner

Whole slide imaging (WSI) scanner scans pathological specimens to produce digital slides to use in pathology practice, research, and computational pathology, which enables monitor-based diagnosis and image analysis. However, the scanned image is sometimes insufficient in quality, such as focusing error and noise. Therefore, a quality evaluation method is obligatory for the practical use of the WSI system. In previous work, a referenceless quality evaluation technique was proposed for this purpose, but some artifacts (i.e., tissue-fold, air-bubble) in the slide would also be detected as false positives while they are useless. In this paper, we proposed a method for the practical system to assess WSI quality with eliminating false detection due to the artifacts. Firstly, a support vector machine (SVM) was utilized for detecting ROIs with artifacts and then the image quality was evaluated, excluding detected ROIs. Through the experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed system has been demonstrated.