Fusion and integration pipelines for optical and chemical imaging data for clinical interpretation in ex-vivo diagnosis

In the realm of ex-vivo diagnosis, the integration of optical and chemical imaging data has emerged as a transformative approach, offering a comprehensive understanding of biological specimens at a molecular level. Chemical imaging of human tissue specimens provides an all-digital label-free approach to imaging in objective histopathology, though it requires reference to gold standard pathological (e.g. haematoxylin and eosin (H+E) stained) images for pathological interpretation. Optical imaging techniques, such as microscopy and spectroscopy, provide detailed spatial information, capturing morphological features with high resolution. Concurrently, chemical imaging methods, including mass spectrometry and Raman spectroscopy, offer insights into molecular composition. The challenge lies in harnessing the complementary strengths of these disparate modalities to extract a holistic understanding of the sample. In this work we present the results of several image alignment approaches for fusion and integration of chemical and pathological imaging data, demonstrating that the process of corner detection is crucial towards precise image alignment.