Detection of tissue folds in whole slide images.

In whole slide imaging (WSI) the quality of scanned images is an interplay between the hardware specifications of the scanning device and the condition of the tissue slide itself. Tissue artifacts such as folds and bubbles have been known to affect the efficiency of a whole slide scanning system in selecting the focus points wherein the presence of the said artifacts have been found to produce blur or unfocused images. Thus, for a whole slide scanning device to produce the best image quality, even with the presence of tissue artifacts, information on the location of these artifacts should be known such that they can be avoided in the selection of the focus points. In this paper we introduced an enhancement method to emphasize and detect the location of the tissue folds from whole slide images. Results of the experiments that we conducted on various H&E stained images that were scanned using different scanners show the robustness of the method to detect tissue folds.