PMIQD 2019: A Pathological Microscopic Image Quality Database with Nonexpert and Expert Scores

In medical diagnostic analysis, pathological microscopic image is often regarded as a gold standard, and hence the study of pathological microscopic image is of great necessity. High quality microscopic pathological images enable doctors to arrive at correct diagnosis. The pathological microscopic image is an important cornerstone for modernization and computerization of medical procedures. The quality of pathological microscopic images may be degraded due to a variety of reasons. It is difficult to acquire key information, so research for quality assessment of pathological microscopic image is quite necessary. In this paper, we perform a study on subjective quality assessment of pathological microscopic images and investigate whether the existing objective quality measures can be applied to the pathological microscopic images. Concretely, we establish a new pathological microscopic image quality database (PMIQD) which includes 425 pathological microscopic images with different quality degrees. The mean opinion scores rated by nonexperts and experts are calculated afterwards. Besides, we investigate the prediction performance of the existing popular image quality assessment (IQA) algorithms on PMIQD, including 8 no-reference (NR) methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the present objective models do not work well. IQA for pathological microscopic image needs to be developed for predicting the quality rated by nonexperts and experts.