Salvi Massimo, Caputo Alessandro, Balmativola Davide, Scotto Manuela, Pennisi Orazio, Michielli Nicola, Mogetta Alessandro, Molinari Filippo, Fraggetta Filippo
Biolab, PoliToBIOMed Lab, Department of Electronics and Telecommunications, Politecnico di Torino, Corso Duca degli Abruzzi 24, 10129 Turin, Italy.
Department of Medicine and Surgery, University Hospital of Salerno, 84084 Fisciano, Italy.
Cancers (Basel). 2023 Feb 27;15(5):1503. doi: 10.3390/cancers15051503.
In clinical routine, the quality of whole-slide images plays a key role in the pathologist's diagnosis, and suboptimal staining may be a limiting factor. The stain normalization process helps to solve this problem through the standardization of color appearance of a source image with respect to a target image with optimal chromatic features. The analysis is focused on the evaluation of the following parameters assessed by two experts on original and normalized slides: (i) perceived color quality, (ii) diagnosis for the patient, (iii) diagnostic confidence and (iv) time required for diagnosis. Results show a statistically significant increase in color quality in the normalized images for both experts ( < 0.0001). Regarding prostate cancer assessment, the average times for diagnosis are significantly lower for normalized images than original ones (first expert: 69.9 s vs. 77.9 s with < 0.0001; second expert: 37.4 s vs. 52.7 s with < 0.0001), and at the same time, a statistically significant increase in diagnostic confidence is proven. The improvement of poor-quality images and greater clarity of diagnostically important details in normalized slides demonstrate the potential of stain normalization in the routine practice of prostate cancer assessment.
在临床常规操作中，全切片图像的质量在病理学家的诊断中起着关键作用，而染色不佳可能是一个限制因素。染色归一化过程通过将具有最佳色彩特征的目标图像的颜色外观标准化，有助于解决这个问题。分析重点在于评估两位专家对原始切片和归一化切片所评估的以下参数：（i）感知颜色质量，（ii）患者诊断结果，（iii）诊断信心，以及（iv）诊断所需时间。结果显示，两位专家对归一化图像的颜色质量均有统计学上的显著提高（<0.0001）。关于前列腺癌评估，归一化图像的平均诊断时间明显低于原始图像（第一位专家：69.9秒对77.9秒，<0.0001；第二位专家：37.4秒对52.7秒，<0.0001），同时，诊断信心有统计学上的显著提高。归一化切片中质量较差图像的改善以及诊断重要细节的更清晰显示，证明了染色归一化在前列腺癌评估常规实践中的潜力。
