High-throughput fast full-color digital pathology based on Fourier ptychographic microscopy via color transfer

The usage of full-color imaging in digital pathology produces significant results. Compared with a grayscale image or a pseudocolor image containing contrast information, a full-color image can identify and detect the target object better with color texture information. Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) is a high-throughput computational imaging technique that breaks the tradeoff between high resolution (HR) and a large field of view. It also eliminates the artifacts of scanning and stitching in digital pathology and improves its imaging efficiency. However, the conventional full-color digital pathology based on FPM is still time-consuming because of the repeated experiments with tri-wavelengths. A color transfer FPM approach termed “CFPM” was reported. The color texture information of a low-resolution full-color pathologic image is directly transferred to the HR grayscale FPM image captured by only a single wavelength. Both of the color space of FPM based on the standard CIE-XYZ color model and the display based on the standard RGB color space were established. Different FPM colorization schemes were analyzed and compared with 30 biological samples. Three types of evaluation approaches were provided, including the root-mean-square error (RMSE), the difference maps, and the image histogram cosine similarity. The average RMSE values of the conventional method and CFPM compared with the ground truth were 5.3% and 5.7%, respectively. Therefore, the reconstruction time is significantly reduced by 2/3 with the sacrifice of precision of only 0.4%. The CFPM method is also compatible with advanced fast FPM approaches to further reduce computation time.