Validation of Histology Image Registration

The aim of this paper is to validate an image registration pipeline used for histology image alignment. In this work a set of histology images are registered to their correspondent optical blockface images to make a histology volume. Then multi-modality fiducial markers are used to validate the alignment of histology images. The fiducial markers are catheters perfused with a mixture of cuttlefish ink and flour. Based on our previous investigations this fiducial marker is visible in medical images, optical blockface images and it can also be localized in histology images. The properties of this fiducial marker make it suitable for validation of the registration techniques used for histology image alignment. This paper reports on the accuracy of a histology image registration approach by calculation of target registration error using these fiducial markers.