3D reconstruction of prostate histology based on quantified tissue cutting and deformation parameters

Abstract

Methods for 3D histology reconstruction from sparse 2D digital histology images depend on knowledge about the positions, orientations, and deformations of tissue slices due to the histology process. This work quantitatively evaluates typical assumptions about the position and orientation of whole-mount prostate histology sections within coarsely sliced tissue blocks and about the deformation of tissue during histological processing and sectioning. 3-5 midgland tissue blocks from each of 7 radical prostatectomy specimens were imaged using magnetic resonance imaging before histology processing. After standard whole-mount paraffin processing and sectioning, the resulting sections were digitised. Homologous anatomic landmarks were identified on 22 midgland histology and MR images. Orientations and depths of sections relative to the front faces of the tissue blocks were measured based on the best-fit plane through the landmarks on the MR images. The mean±std section orientation was 1.7±1.1° and the mean±std depth of the sections was 1.0±0.5 mm. Deformation was assessed by using four transformation models (rigid, rigid+scale, affine and thin-plate-spline (TPS)) to align landmarks from histology and MR images, and evaluating each by measuring the target registration error (TRE) using a leave-one-out cross-validation. The rigid transformation model had higher mean TRE (p<0.001) than the other models, and the rigid+scale and affine models had higher mean TRE than the TPS model (p<0.001 and p<0.01 respectively). These results informed the design and development of a method for 3D prostate histology reconstruction based on extrinsic strand-shaped fiducial markers which yielded a 0.7±0.4 mm mean±std TRE.