"Rapid" regions-of-interest detection in big histopathological images

The sheer volume and size of histopathological images (e.g., 10 MPixel) underscores the need for faster and more accurate Regions-of-interest (ROI) detection algorithms. In this paper, we propose such an algorithm, which has four main components that help achieve greater accuracy and faster speed: First, while using coarse-to-fine topology preserving segmentation as the baseline, the proposed algorithm uses a superpixel regularity optimization scheme for avoiding irregular and extremely small superpixels. Second, the proposed technique employs a prediction strategy to focus only on important superpixels at finer image levels. Third, the algorithm reuses the information gained from the coarsest image level at other finer image levels. Both the second and the third components drastically lower the complexity. Fourth, the algorithm employs a highly effective parallelization scheme using adaptive data partitioning, which gains high speedup. Experimental results, conducted on the BSD500 [1] and 500 whole-slide histological images from the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST)1 dataset, confirm that the proposed algorithm gained 13 times speedup compared with the baseline, and around 160 times compared with SLIC [11], without losing accuracy.