Background correction and stitching of histological plaque images

Histological examination of atherosclerotic plaques is the gold standard for the analysis of vessel plaque composition. The digitalization of the microscopic histology images results in a set of image tiles with overlapping regions of the same histological 2D slice. To allow comparison with other imaging modalities the tiles must be stitched together to a complete image of the plaque. The purpose of this work is to develop custom processing methods for the intensity correction and stitching problems. The developed methods are applied to 19 plaque images from an ongoing study. Results are compared with manual as well as automatic photo stitching.