Interactive Histology of large-scale biomedical image stacks

Won Ki Jeong*, Jens Schneider, Stephen Turney, Beverly E. Faulkner-Jones, Dominik Meyer, Rüdiger Westermann, R. Clay Reid, Jeff Lichtman, Hanspeter Pfister

*Corresponding author for this work

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    27 Scopus citations

    Abstract

    Histology is the study of the structure of biological tissue using microscopy techniques. As digital imaging technology advances, high resolution microscopy of large tissue volumes is becoming feasible; however, new interactive tools are needed to explore and analyze the enormous datasets. In this paper we present a visualization framework that specifically targets interactive examination of arbitrarily large image stacks. Our framework is built upon two core techniques: display-aware processing and GPU-accelerated texture compression. With display-aware processing, only the currently visible image tiles are fetched and aligned on-the-fly, reducing memory bandwidth and minimizing the need for time-consuming global pre-processing. Our novel texture compression scheme for GPUs is tailored for quick browsing of image stacks. We evaluate the usability of our viewer for two histology applications: digital pathology and visualization of neural structure at nanoscale-resolution in serial electron micrographs.

    Original languageEnglish (US)
    Article number5613479
    Pages (from-to)1386-1395
    Number of pages10
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics
    Volume16
    Issue number6
    DOIs
    StatePublished - 2010

    Keywords

    • GPU
    • Gigapixel viewer
    • biomedical image processing
    • texture compression

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Software
    • Signal Processing
    • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
    • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design

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