Fig. 3.

Method to evaluate the cancer sites of the excised human skin cancer specimens. (a) Fresh tissue probe fluorescence image. (b) Fresh tissue color image that is registered to the probe fluorescence image. (c) Following fixation, the specimen is bread-loafed into tissue blocks. (d) The block image is processed after segmentation and rotation adjustment. (e) The affine registration result of the “reconstructed fixed tissue image.” (f) The nonrigid, free-form deformation, registered, reconstructed, and fixed tissue image after affine registration. (g) Each slice of the bread loaf is turned on its edge (12 o’clock), processed, and sectioned to obtain H&E slides from the tissue blocks. Areas of cancer on each histological section are marked by a pathologist. Histological annotations are then projected onto lines in blue as normal regions, red as cancer regions, and black as the scoring marks. (h) The histological section is registered to the corresponding tissue slice, and the areas of cancer are copied onto the fluorescence image. To aid registration, a tissue score is added by cutting the tissue specimen surface with a scalpel. Zoomed in view of the center in H&E slide from tissue blocks 6 and 7 are shown in (i) and (j), respectively.