title: Building of a composite virtual slide from contiguous tissue samples.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Currently available microscope slide scanners produce whole slide images at various resolutions from histological sections. Nevertheless, acquisition area and so visualization of large tissue samples are limited by the standardized size of glass slides, used daily in pathology departments. The proposed solution has been developed to build composite virtual slides from images of large tumor fragments.
  
  
  METHODS
  Images of HES or immunostained histological sections of carefully labeled fragments from a representative slice of breast carcinoma were acquired with a digital slide scanner at a magnification of 20×. The tiling program involves three steps: the straightening of tissue fragment images using polynomial interpolation method, and the building and assembling of strips of contiguous tissue sample whole slide images in × and y directions. The final image is saved in a pyramidal BigTiff file format. The program has been tested on several tumor slices. A correlation quality control has been done on five images artificially cut.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Sixty tumor slices from twenty surgical specimens, cut into two to twenty six pieces, were reconstructed. A median of 98.71% is obtained by computing the correlation coefficients between native and reconstructed images for quality control.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The proposed method is efficient and able to adapt itself to daily work conditions of classical pathology laboratories.
authors.forename: Benoît
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Plancoulaine
authors.forename: Myriam
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Oger
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Elie
authors.forename: Philippe
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Belhomme
authors.forename: Paulette
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Herlin
authors.forename: Abir
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Nasri
authors.forename: Célia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Augé
authors.forename: Mylène
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brécin
authors.forename: Jacques
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Marnay
authors.forename: Catherine
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bor-Angelier
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001943:Breast Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D010338:Pathology, Clinical / Q000379:methods*