C++ Whole Slide Image (WSI) Processing Tutorial

Contents

This is a tutorial for whole slide image (WSI) processing in FAST with C++. Make sure you already have looked at the introduction tutorial, especially the part about setting up a cmake project, compiling and running the test application.

Whole-slide images (WSI)

WSIs are digitized microscopy images, for instance of cross-section tissue samples of cancer tumours. Depending on the magnification used, these images are ofte gigantic, and may have sizes up to 200,000 x 200,000 pixels. This poses several memory and processing challenges, as the entire image typically can't fit into RAM nor the GPU RAM. These images are therefore usually stored as a tiled image pyramid. In FAST, such an image is represented by the ImagePyramid data object. Level 0 in the pyramid is the full resolution image W x H, while the next level 1 is the same image but with a reduced size, typically half the width and height of the previous level (W/2 x H/2). A large image can have many of these levels. In addition, every level image is divided into patches, or tiles, where each patch has a typical size around 256 x 256 pixels. When rendering, the appropriate level is used for the current zoom, and only patches which are visible in the viewport are loaded into memory.

Open and display a WSI

To open a WSI, use the WholeSlideImageImporter process object which uses the OpenSlide library. Displaying a WSI is done with the ImagePyramidRenderer. The example below shows how to load the A05 WSI included in the test dataset.

auto importer = WholeSlideImageImporter::create(Config::getTestDataPath() + "/WSI/CMU-1.svs");

auto renderer = ImagePyramidRenderer::create()->connect(importer);

auto window = SimpleWindow2D::create()->connect(renderer);
window->run();

Patch-wise processing

Export high-resolution segmentations

Next steps