Background: Digital staining can be considered as a special form of image enhancement wherein the concern is not only to increase the contrast between the background objects and objects of interest, but to also impart the colors that mark the objects' unique reactions to a specific stain. In this paper, we extended the previously proposed multispectral enhancement methods such that the colors of the background pixels can also be changed.
Methods: In the previous multispectral enhancement methods a shifting factor is provided to the original spectrum. To implement digital staining, a spectral transformation process is introduced prior to spectral shifting.
Results: The enhancement method is applied to multispectral images of H&E stained liver tissue. The resulting digitally stained images show good correlation with the serial-section images of the tissue which are physically stained with Masson's trichrome.
Conclusions: We have presented a multispectral enhancement method that can be adjusted to produce digitally stained-images. The current experimental results show the viability of the method. However, to achieve robust enhancement performance issues that arise from variations in staining conditions has to be addressed as well. This would be part of our future work.