Digital histology

Synonyms
Digital pathology imaging
Description

Cytomine is a rich internet application using modern web and distributed technologies (Grails, HTML/CSS/Javascript, Docker), databases (spatial SQL and NoSQL), and machine learning (tree-based approaches with random subwindows) to foster active and distributed collaboration and ease large-scale image exploitation.

It provides remote and collaborative principles, rely on data models that allow to easily organize and semantically annotate imaging datasets in a standardized way (using user-defined ontologies associated to regions of interest), efficiently support high-resolution multi-gigapixel images (incl. major digital scanner image formats), and provide mechanisms to readily proofread and share image quantifications produced by any image recognition algorithms.

By emphasizing collaborative principles, the aim of Cytomine is to accelerate scientific progress and to significantly promote image data accessibility and reusability. Cytomine allows to break common practices in this domain where imaging datasets, quantification results, and associated knowledge are still often stored and analyzed within the restricted circle of a specific laboratory.

This software is e.g. being used by life scientists in to help them better evaluate drug treatments or understand biological processes directly from whole-slide tissue images (digital histology), by pathologists to share and ease their diagnosis, and by teachers and students for pathology training purposes. It is also used in various microscopy applications.

Cytomine can be used as a stand-alone application (e.g. on a laptop) or on larger servers for collaborative works.

Cytomine implements object classification, image segmentation, content-based image retrieval, object counting, and interest point detection algorithms using machine learning.

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Description

Adiposoft is an automated Open Source software for the analysis of adipose tissue cellularity in histological sections.

Example data can be found on the plugin description page in ImageJ wiki (download link). There is also a link to a MATLAB version of the workflow.

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Description

CellDetector can detect cells (or other objects) in microscopy images such as histopathology, fluorescence, phase contrast, bright field, etc. It uses a machine learning-based method where a cell model is learned from simple dot annotations on a few images for training and predict on test sets. The installation requires some efforts but the instruction is well explained. Training parameters should be tuned for different datasets, but the default settings could be a good starting point.

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Description

This article Baslat et al. presents a method to compute Lymphatic Vessel Density on an image of the whole slide (a workflow documented as text).

Vessels are obtained with a Maximum Entropy Thresholding applied on the excess Red channel (2 times the red values minus blue+green value). Stroma tissue is obtained with a Moment Preserving Thresholding on the blue channel.

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Description

The overall colors seen in H&E stained slides can vary widely, influenced by factors such as the precise stains and scanner used. This MATLAB function implements the color normalization strategy described in Macenko et al (2009) in order to match stain colors in an image more closely to 'reference' stains. This may help when comparing images visually, or when applying an automated analysis algorithm.

The function may also be useful to understand the functioning of the color deconvolution described in Ruifork and Johnston (2001).

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