Effects of Image Compression on Automatic Count of Immunohistochemically Stained Nuclei in Digital Images
- Carlos Lópeza,
- Marylène Lejeunea,
- Patricia Escrivàa,
- Ramón Boscha,
- Maria Teresa Salvadóa,
- Lluis E Ponsa,
- Jordi Baucellsb,
- Xavier Cugatb,
- Tomás Álvaroa,
- Joaquín Jaéna
- aDepartment of Pathology, Hospital de Tortosa Verge de la Cinta, Tortosa, Spain
- bDepartment of Informatics, Hospital de Tortosa Verge de la Cinta, Tortosa, Spain
- Correspondence: Joaquín Jaén Martínez, Department of Pathology, Hospital de Tortosa Verge de la Cinta, C/Esplanetes no. 14, 43500-Tortosa, Spain; (e-mail: <jjaen.htvc.ics{at}gencat.net>)
- Received 7 February 2008
- Accepted 3 August 2008
Abstract
This study investigates the effects of digital image compression on automatic quantification of immunohistochemical nuclear markers. We examined 188 images with a previously validated computer-assisted analysis system. A first group was composed of 47 images captured in TIFF format, and other three contained the same images converted from TIFF to JPEG format with 3×, 23× and 46× compression. Counts of TIFF format images were compared with the other three groups. Overall, differences in the count of the images increased with the percentage of compression. Low-complexity images (≤100 cells/field, without clusters or with small-area clusters) had small differences (<5 cells/field in 95–100% of cases) and high-complexity images showed substantial differences (<35–50 cells/field in 95–100% of cases).
Compression does not compromise the accuracy of immunohistochemical nuclear marker counts obtained by computer-assisted analysis systems for digital images with low complexity and could be an efficient method for storing these images.
Footnotes
-
This work was supported by grants FIS 04/1440, 04/1467 and 05/1527 from the Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo, Spain.
