Histopathology image registration by integrated texture and spatial proximity based landmark selection and modification

Three-dimensional (3D) digital pathology has been emerging for next-generation tissue based cancer research. To enable such histopathology image volume analysis, serial histopathology slides need to be well aligned. In this paper, we propose a histopathology image registration fine tuning method with integrated landmark evaluations by texture and spatial proximity measures. Representative anatomical structures and image corner features are first detected as landmark candidates. Next, we identify strong and modify weak matched landmarks by leveraging image texture features and landmark spatial proximity measures. Both qualitative and quantitative results of extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed method is robust and can further enhance registration accuracy of our previously registered image set by 31.15% (correlation), 4.88% (mutual information), and 41.02% (mean squared error), respectively. The promising experimental results suggest that our method can be used as a fine tuning module to further boost registration accuracy, a premise of histology spatial and morphology analysis in an information-lossless 3D tissue space for cancer research.