The Devil is in the Details: Whole Slide Image Acquisition and Processing for Artifacts Detection, Color Variation, and Data Augmentation: A Review

Abstract

Whole Slide Images (WSI) are widely used in histopathology for research and the diagnosis of different types of cancer. The preparation and digitization of histological tissues leads to the introduction of artifacts and variations that need to be addressed before the tissues are analyzed. WSI preprocessing can significantly improve the performance of computational pathology systems and is often used to facilitate human or machine analysis. Color preprocessing techniques are frequently mentioned in the literature, while other areas are usually ignored. In this paper, we present a detailed study of the state-of-the-art in three different areas of WSI preprocessing: Artifacts detection, color variation, and the emerging field of pathology-specific data augmentation. We include a summary of evaluation techniques along with a discussion of possible limitations and future research directions for new methods.