Pixelation is Great for Art but Bad for Diagnosis

Paul Signac was an impressionist who along with George Seurat developed the pointillism style of painting.  Signac applied paint in colorful “tiles” or mosaics to create his beautiful and evocative paintings.  Notre Dame de la Garde was the church that sailors would see as they sailed into Marseilles.

Whole slide images are made up of individual photos or tiles that are “stitched together.”  The files are stored in “pyramid” fashion to simulate the process of a microscope going from one objective magnification to the next.  Think of it like Google Maps where one can zoom in  close to a building or zoom out to see an entire city or country.

However, sometimes when panning across a virtual slide or zooming in on a higher magnification, the image becomes “tiled” like Signac’s painting.  While the blurred image may be aesthetically pleasing, it can be very fatiguing on the pathologist to wait for the image to become sharp and clear.  It can effect satisfaction and productivity. See the example below.  The usual cause of tiling is the bandwidth connectivity between the image storage location and the pathologist’s viewer.  But other causes include the WSI scanner’s proprietary image file format, the tile storage format within the pyramid, and what method the viewer determines to retrieve the next file.  Since these features differ among vendors it is important for pathologists when looking to implement a WSI solution to demo the scanner, viewer, network and archival system in as real a situation as possible.

Image Attributions Figure 1. Notre Dame de la Garde (La Bon Mere) Marseilles by Paul Signac, personal photo. Figure 2. Digital Pathology and Image Analysis in tissue biomarker research, Hamilton, P. et. al., Methods, volume 70, 2014 pg 59-73. Figure 3. VirtualMicroscopy: ultra-fast interactive microscopy of gigapixel/terapixel images over internet, Ching-Wei Wang et. al, Scientific Reports volume5, Article number: 14069 (2015)