Development of a 2D Image Reconstruction and Viewing System for Histological Images from Multiple Tissue Blocks: Towards High-Resolution Whole-Organ 3D Histological Images

High-resolution 3D histology image reconstruction of the whole brain organ starts from reconstructing the high-resolution 2D histology images of a brain slice. In this paper, we introduced a method to automatically align the histology images of thin tissue sections cut from the multiple paraffin-embedded tissue blocks of a brain slice. For this method, we employed template matching and incorporated an optimization technique to further improve the accuracy of the 2D reconstructed image. In the template matching, we used the gross image of the brain slice as a reference to the reconstructed 2D histology image of the slice, while in the optimization procedure, we utilized the Jaccard index as the metric of the reconstruction accuracy. The results of our experiment on the initial 3 different whole-brain tissue slices showed that while the method works, it is also constrained by tissue deformations introduced during the tissue processing and slicing. The size of the reconstructed high-resolution 2D histology image of a brain slice is huge, and designing an image viewer that makes particularly efficient use of the computing power of a standard computer used in our laboratories is of interest. We also present the initial implementation of our 2D image viewer system in this paper.