Volume visualization approach for depth-of-field extension in digital pathology

Microscope optics presents two critical limitations of low depth of field and very low or no depth perception. Due to low depth of field, at high magnification levels microscope cannot adequately focus on the object. This can adversely affect the performance of slide digitization procedure in digital pathology. This paper presents a depth of field extension and 3D visualization technique for pathological applications. The technique uses a sequence of low depth of field images of object for generation of high resolution extended depth of field view of the scene by volume visualization technique such as ray casting. This work is directed towards incorporating the method in digital pathology work-flow. Sensing and computational tasks (image sequence acquisition, focus measure computation and volume creation, and volume rendering) involved in the method can be executed by different processing units available in modern computational platforms to achieve high degree of parallelism in implementation and accomplish real time image generation and visualization.