HistoQC: An open-source quality control tool for digital pathology slides

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Our paper is out in: Journal of Clinical Oncology: Clinical Cancer Informatics

Purpose: Digital pathology (DP), referring to the digitization of tissue slides, is beginning to change the landscape of clinical diagnostic workflows and has engendered active research within the area of computational pathology. One of the challenges in DP is the presence of artifacts and batch effects; unintentionally introduced during both routine slide preparation (e.g., staining, tissue folding, etc.) as well as digitization (e.g., blurriness, variations in contrast and hue). Manual review of glass and digital slides is laborious, qualitative, and subject to intra/inter-reader variability. There is thus a critical need for a reproducible automated approach of precisely localizing artifacts in order to identify slides which need to be reproduced or regions which should be avoided during computational analysis.

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