Su Yiyan, Sun Ruiqing, Wang Yajing, Xi Yanfeng, Zhang Shaohui
Department of Health Statistics, School of Public Health, Shanxi Medical University, Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, China.
School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China.
Cancer Med. 2025 Jun;14(12):e70989. doi: 10.1002/cam4.70989.
Tumor budding is an independent predictor of metastasis and prognosis in colorectal cancer and is a vital part of the pathology specification report. In a conventional pathological section observation process, pathologists have to repeatedly switch from 10× objective to 20× objective several times to localize and image the target region. Besides the switching operations, repeated manual or electro-mechanical focusing is also very time-consuming, affecting the total time for pathological diagnosis. In addition, it is usually necessary to remove the manually marked symbols on the stained pathology slides used for classification and management before observation.
In this paper, we utilize Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) in the pathological diagnosis process to realize large space-bandwidth product imaging, quantitative phase imaging, and digital refocusing in the observation process without any mechanical operations, which can therefore simplify the above-mentioned cumbersome diagnostic processes. We first verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method with several typical pathological sections. Then, instead of manually erasing, we also prove that the FP framework can digitally remove the artificial markers with its digital refocusing ability.
At last, we demonstrated pathologists can achieve 100% diagnostic accuracy with FPM imaging results.
The proposed method can greatly simplify the process of pathological diagnosis, and the related addon hardware system does not require expensive components, which gives it great potential for promotion in the field of pathological diagnosis.
肿瘤芽生是结直肠癌转移和预后的独立预测指标，是病理诊断报告的重要组成部分。在传统病理切片观察过程中，病理学家必须多次从10倍物镜反复切换到20倍物镜，以定位和成像目标区域。除了切换操作外，反复的手动或电动聚焦也非常耗时，影响病理诊断的总时间。此外，在观察前通常需要去除用于分类和管理的染色病理切片上的手动标记符号。
在本文中，我们在病理诊断过程中利用傅里叶叠层显微镜（FPM），在观察过程中无需任何机械操作即可实现大空间带宽积成像、定量相位成像和数字重聚焦，从而简化上述繁琐的诊断过程。我们首先用几个典型病理切片验证了所提方法的有效性和效率。然后，我们还证明了FP框架可以利用其数字重聚焦能力以数字方式去除人工标记，而不是手动擦除。
最后，我们证明病理学家可以通过FPM成像结果实现100%的诊断准确率。
所提方法可以大大简化病理诊断过程，且相关的附加硬件系统不需要昂贵的组件，这使其在病理诊断领域具有很大的推广潜力。
