High-throughput fast full-color digital pathology based on Fourier ptychographic microscopy via color transfer

Full-color imaging is significant in digital pathology. Compared with a grayscale image or a pseudo-color image that only contains the contrast information, it can identify and detect the target object better with color texture information. Fourier ptychographic microscopy (FPM) is a high-throughput computational imaging technique that breaks the tradeoff between high resolution (HR) and large field-of-view (FOV), which eliminates the artifacts of scanning and stitching in digital pathology and improves its imaging efficiency. However, the conventional full-color digital pathology based on FPM is still time-consuming due to the repeated experiments with tri-wavelengths. A color transfer FPM approach, termed CFPM was reported. The color texture information of a low resolution (LR) full-color pathologic image is directly transferred to the HR grayscale FPM image captured by only a single wavelength. The color space of FPM based on the standard CIE-XYZ color model and display based on the standard RGB (sRGB) color space were established. Different FPM colorization schemes were analyzed and compared with thirty different biological samples. The average root-mean-square error (RMSE) of the conventional method and CFPM compared with the ground truth is 5.3% and 5.7%, respectively. Therefore, the acquisition time is significantly reduced by 2/3 with the sacrifice of precision of only 0.4%. And CFPM method is also compatible with advanced fast FPM approaches to reduce computation time further.