Study of micromanipulation systemfor observing and positioning pathological slides

Pathological observation is necessary for pathological diagnosis. In hospitals, the observation is done under the microscope to find the lesions on a pathological slide. Manual operating suffers from time consuming, unable to preserve and poor repeatability. In order to raise efficiency of pathological observation and be able to locate to the selected areas of slides for more specific investigations, an image expert system is study in this paper. The system is capable of image scanning, image mosaicking, and repeated positioning. A custom-adapted hardware platform is used for pathological slide scanning and image capturing. The scanning error caused by platform and camera is dealt with coordinate compensation. The images are mosaicked as a panorama by image registration and fusion. To realize the repeated positioning, the screen coordinate system and physical coordinate system are proposed. As the experimental results show, the system is able to acquire and store all the pathological images of a slide (20mm × 20mm) within 3 minutes and mosaic them as a panorama for observing and positioning. After repeated positioning, the positioning of those selected areas shown in the middle zone of the camera screen, covered the range of (420pix × 420pix). The success rate of repeated positioning is about 96%. The error is acceptable in pathological slide observation.