We present H&E Otsu thresholding, a scheme for rapidly detecting tissue in whole-slide images (WSIs) that eliminates a wide range of undesirable artefacts such as pen marks and scanning artefacts. Our method involves obtaining a bid-modal representation of a low-magnification RGB overview image which enables simple Otsu thresholding to separate tissue from background and artefacts. We demonstrate our method on WSIs prepared from a wide range of institutions and WSI digital scanners, each containing substantial artefacts that cause other methods to fail. The beauty of our approach lies in its simplicity: manipulating RGB colour space and using Otsu thresholding allows for the rapid removal of artefacts and segmentation of tissue.

翻译：我们提出了一种名为H&E Otsu阈值法的方案，用于在全切片图像（WSI）中快速检测组织，该方法能有效消除笔迹标记、扫描伪影等多种不良伪影。本方法通过获取低倍率RGB概览图像的双模态表征，使得简单的Otsu阈值法能够将组织与背景及伪影分离。我们在来自不同机构及WSI数字扫描仪制备的切片上验证了该方法，这些切片均包含导致其他方法失效的大量伪影。本方法的优势在于其简洁性：通过RGB色彩空间操作结合Otsu阈值法，即可实现伪影的快速去除与组织的精准分割。