A tiling and routing heuristic for the screening of cytological samples

In the screening of cytological samples, st slide is examined using a micro scope. Since the area of the specimen is very large compared with the area of a microscope field of view (FOV), a large number of FOVs is needed to co ver the entire specimen area. A heuristic reducing the number of FOVs has b een developed to aid in screening these specimens on the automated microsco py workstation. A smear slide is prescreened on a computer-aided optimal mi croscope system and locations of diagnostically significant material are st ored. The heuristic computes a set of FOVs that covers this material and a route between them. As the problem is of large scale and must be solved rep eatedly in real time any heuristic must be very fast. Our heuristic solves a set partitioning problem, followed by a traveling salesman problem. It pr oduces a good solution within a very short computing time.