Sequential Patching Lattice for Image Classification and Enquiry: Streamlining Digital Pathology Image Processing

Digital pathology and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) models have revolutionized histopathology, opening new opportunities. With the increasing availability of whole-slide images (WSIs), demand is growing for efficient retrieval, processing, and analysis of relevant images from vast biomedical archives. However, processing WSIs presents challenges due to their large size and content complexity. Full computer digestion of WSIs is impractical, and processing all patches individually is prohibitively expensive. In this article, we propose an unsupervised patching algorithm, Sequential Patching Lattice for Image Classification and Enquiry (SPLICE). This novel approach condenses a histopathology WSI into a compact set of representative patches, forming a collage of WSI while minimizing redundancy. SPLICE prioritizes patch quality and uniqueness by sequentially analyzing a WSI and selecting nonredundant representative features. In search and match applications, SPLICE showed improved accuracy, reduced computation time, and storage requirements compared with existing state-of-the-art methods. As an unsupervised method, SPLICE effectively reduced storage requirements for representing tissue images by 50%. This reduction can enable numerous algorithms in computational pathology to operate much more efficiently, paving the way for accelerated adoption of digital pathology.