Digital pathology and the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) models have revolutionized histopathology, opening new opportunities. With the increasing availability of Whole Slide Images (WSIs), there's a growing demand for efficient retrieval, processing, and analysis of relevant images from vast biomedical archives. However, processing WSIs presents challenges due to their large size and content complexity. Full computer digestion of WSIs is impractical, and processing all patches individually is prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised patching algorithm, Sequential Patching Lattice for Image Classification and Enquiry (SPLICE). This novel approach condenses a histopathology WSI into a compact set of representative patches, forming a "collage" of WSI while minimizing redundancy. SPLICE prioritizes patch quality and uniqueness by sequentially analyzing a WSI and selecting non-redundant representative features. We evaluated SPLICE for search and match applications, demonstrating improved accuracy, reduced computation time, and storage requirements compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. As an unsupervised method, SPLICE effectively reduces storage requirements for representing tissue images by 50%. This reduction enables numerous algorithms in computational pathology to operate much more efficiently, paving the way for accelerated adoption of digital pathology.

数字病理学和人工智能模型的整合已经改变了组织病理学，为全面扫描图像（WSIs）的处理和分析提供了新机遇。本文提出了一种无监督补丁算法SPLICE，通过顺序分析WSIs并选择非冗余特征，将WSIs压缩为紧凑的代表性补丁集，从而提高了搜索和匹配应用的准确性，减少了计算时间和存储需求。SPLICE作为一种无监督方法，可以将组织图像的存储需求降低50％，从而使计算病理学的许多算法能够更高效地运行，为数字病理学的快速应用铺平了道路。

简化数字病理图像处理的SPLICE方法