Localization of Diagnostically Relevant Regions of Interest in Whole Slide Images: a Comparative Study

Whole slide imaging technology enables pathologists to screen biopsy images and make a diagnosis in a digital form. This creates an opportunity to understand the screening patterns of expert pathologists and extract the patterns that lead to accurate and efficient diagnoses. For this purpose, we are taking the first step to interpret the recorded actions of world-class expert pathologists on a set of digitized breast biopsy images. We propose an algorithm to extract regions of interest from the logs of image screenings using zoom levels, time and the magnitude of panning motion. Using diagnostically relevant regions marked by experts, we use the visual bag-of-words model with texture and color features to describe these regions and train probabilistic classifiers to predict similar regions of interest in new whole slide images. The proposed algorithm gives promising results for detecting diagnostically relevant regions. We hope this attempt to predict the regions that attract pathologists' attention will provide the first step in a more comprehensive study to understand the diagnostic patterns in histopathology.