Background on Color Calibration
Digital whole slide image scanners are designed to take stained tissue on glass slides and digitize them into bytes for usage in the digital world. The process by which slide scanners perform this operation does not produce a perfect digital equivalent of the original slide as the hardware involved (led/blub, camera sensor, quantizer) can introduce some biases during the sampling process. For example, different camera sensors may detect colors with different levels of specificity/accuracy/density, resulting in similar but not perfect representations of the associated real-world subjects.
Concretely, there is often a difference between the color you perceive in the real-world under a microscope versus what you would see if you looked at the corresponding digital copy of the same slide. This blog post discusses how to correct for this discrepancy using ICC profiles.
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