A Bilinear Interpolation Based Approach for Optimizing Hematoxylin and Eosin Stained Microscopical Images

Hematoxylin & Eosin (H&E) is a widely used staining technique in medical pathology for distinguishing nuclei and cytoplasm in tissues by dying them in different colors; this helps to ease the diagnosis process. However, usually the microscopic digital images obtained using this technique suffer from uneven lighting, i.e. poor Koehler illumination. The existing ad-hoc methods for correcting this problem generally work in RGB color model, and may result in both an unwanted color shift and loosing essential details in terms of the diagnosis. The aim of this study is to present an alternative method that remedies these deficiencies. We first identify the characteristics of uneven lighting in pathological images produced by using the H&E technique, and then show how the quality of these images can be improved by applying an interpolation based approach in the Lab color model without losing any important detail. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated on sample microscopic images.