title: Registration of histological whole slide images guided by vessel structures.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The registration of histological whole slide images is an important prerequisite for modern histological image analysis. A partial reconstruction of the original volume allows e.g. colocalization analysis of tissue parameters or high-detail reconstructions of anatomical structures in 3D.
  
  
  METHODS
  In this paper, we present an automatic staining-invariant registration method, and as part of that, introduce a novel vessel-based rigid registration algorithm using a custom similarity measure. The method is based on an iterative best-fit matching of prominent vessel structures.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We evaluated our method on a sophisticated synthetic dataset as well as on real histological whole slide images. Based on labeled vessel structures we compared the relative differences for corresponding structures. The average positional error was close to 0, the median for the size change factor was 1, and the median overlap was 0.77.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The results show that our approach is very robust and creates high quality reconstructions. The key element for the resulting quality is our novel rigid registration algorithm.
authors.affiliation: Fraunhofer MEVIS, Institute for Medical Image Computing, Bremen, Germany.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schwier
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Böhler
authors.forename: Horst Karl
authors.initials: HK
authors.lastname: Hahn
authors.forename: Uta
authors.initials: U
authors.lastname: Dahmen
authors.forename: Olaf
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Dirsch
keywords: Elastic registration; histology; rigid registration; vessel structure; whole slide images