Determination of image registration quality in an automated tissue dissection process

Abstract

In one aspect, the invention relates to a method of quality control in an image registration process, the result of which process is used in an automated dissection process in which tissue is dissected from a dissection slide, on which a tissue section cut from a tissue sample is disposed. The method (10) comprises steps of: • obtaining (11) a first image of a reference slide containing a reference sample cut from the same tissue sample; • obtaining (12) a second image of the dissection slide; • registering (20) the first image onto the second image, whereby a transformation matrix is calculated as part of the image registration process, which results in a best fit between the first image and the second image; • calculating (30) a first metric of quality for the image registration process, based on a degree of overlap between the first image and the second image; • calculating (40) a second metric of quality for the image registration process, based on a parameter indicative of the skewness and non-symmetric scaling of the transformation matrix; • comparing (50) each value calculated for the first and the second quality metric against a corresponding threshold, to determine whether each quality metric is satisfied; and • determining that the image registration quality is unsatisfactory if either the first or the second quality metric fails to be satisfied and reporting (60) the determination to a user.

Images