Development of support systems for pathology using spectral transmittance - The quantification method of stain conditions

In pathological diagnosis, a tissue sample is stained and observed under a microscope. But the color of the reproduced image varies due to the stain conditions and the characteristics of observation devices. Thus paper proposes a method for quantification of stain conditions from microscopic image taken by a multispectral digital camera. In the proposed method, the transmittance spectra are estimated from the multispectral image, and the amount of stain color pigments is obtained based on the Beer-Lambert law. Through the experiment using the Hematoxylin & Eosin stained tissue samples, it is confirmed that the concentration of both Hematoxylin and Eosin pigments are successfully estimated by the proposed method.