An orientation-free ring feature descriptor with stain-variability normalization for pathology image matching

Abstract

Comprehensively analyzing the corresponding regions in the images of serial slices stained using different methods is a common but important operation in pathological diagnosis. To help increase the efficiency of the analysis, various image registration methods are proposed to match the corresponding regions in different images, but their performance is highly influenced by the rotations, deformations, and variations of staining between the serial pathology images. In this work, we propose an orientation-free ring feature descriptor with stain-variability normalization for pathology image matching. Specifically, we normalize image staining to similar levels to minimize the impact of staining differences on pathology image matching. To overcome the rotation and deformation issues, we propose a rotation-invariance orientation-free ring feature descriptor that generates novel adaptive bins from ring features to build feature vectors. We measure the Euclidean distance of the feature vectors to evaluate keypoint similarity to achieve pathology image matching. A total of 46 pairs of clinical pathology images in hematoxylin-eosin and immunohistochemistry straining to verify the performance of our method. Experimental results indicate that our method meets the pathology image matching accuracy requirements (error ¡ 300μm), especially competent for large-angle rotation cases common in clinical practice.