Deep Ordinal Focus Assessment for Whole Slide Images

Abstract

Medical image quality assessment plays an important role not only in the design and manufacturing processes of image acquisition but also in the optimization of decision support systems. This work introduces a new deep ordinal learning approach for focus assessment in whole slide images. From the blurred image to the focused image there is an ordinal progression that contains relevant knowledge for more robust learning of the models. With this new method, it is possible to infer quality without losing ordinal information about focus since instead of using the nominal cross-entropy loss for training, ordinal losses were used. Our proposed model is contrasted against other state-of-the-art methods present in the literature. A first conclusion is a benefit of using data-driven methods instead of knowledge-based methods. Additionally, the proposed model is found to be the top-performer in several metrics. The best per-forming model scores an accuracy of 94.4% for a 12 classes classification problem in the FocusPath database.