Fast image registration technology patent granted in the US

microDimensions announced today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued the US Patent 2015/0016703 A1 for its method for image registration of sections, in particular of histological sections. The patented technology enables fast and accurate alignment of whole slide and other large images up to the scanned resolution.

A single histological section can easily require more than 1 GB of storage space. When handling multiple images of this size during the alignment the limits of storage capacity available today can rapidly be exceeded.

To solve this problem and enable efficient digital pathology workflows microDimensions has developed a unique image registration technology that uses a quadtree-like data structure to partition an image into cells with individual local transformations on multiple resolution levels.

This can tremendously speed up the alignment of a region of interest at high resolution, as only a subset of cells is to be processed. The use of local transformations significantly increases the final alignment quality to an accuracy that is only limited by the scanner resolution.

The patented technology is used in the 3D histology software Voloom® to enable fast 3D reconstructions from serial sections. Voloom can reconstruct 3D volumes in a matter of minutes and by this enables researchers to effectively use 3D reconstructions in their daily workflows.

Slidematch™, the latest addition to the microDimensions product line, uses the registration technology for the alignment of differently stained sections to perform e.g. multiplex analysis or compute scores for improved cancer classification.

microDimensions is a spin-off company of the Technische Universität München and has a strong scientific background in the field of image registration. The patented technology was developed in house.

The patent is an important milestone for the company and a major component of our intellectual property. Fast image registration is essential to our products, since it enables a seamless combination of large image files as required by digital pathology workflows.”

Martin Groher, CEO of microDimensions.