Local Regularisation in Histological Registration forPreserving Cell Morphology

Anonymous

Keywords: Whole-Slide Image registration, non-rigid registration, medical imaging, immunohistochemical staining

TL;DR: Cellularity Images are used to weight a regularisation term for whole slide image registration, preserving morphology in cellular regions

Abstract: Histopathological diagnoses may depend on both the presence/absence of specific biomark-ers, as well as cell morphology. When registering histology images, due to structural dif-ferences in consecutive slices or damage during staining, affine transforms may fail to alignhigh-level structures. As such, non-rigid registration can be used to align such structures.This can distort cell morphology, which may be problematic when a diagnosis or inferencedepends on such. We introduce a regularisation approach in which a cell segmentationinduces acellularityimage, indicating a regions degree of cellularity. This is used to weighta pixel-wise regularity term which encourages such regions to be rigid, while permittingnon-rigid deformations elsewhere in the image. We show that under certain configurationsthis method results in no loss of accuracy (as measured by annotated keypoint distances),with potential improvements to measured levels of non-rigidity in cell regions.