Patent ID: 7421102

Claim:
A system for determining a specimen location on a slide and capturing an image of that location, the system comprising: a camera taking a low resolution image of the slide; a first component for automatically identifying a region of the low resolution image containing the specimen, where said region defines only a portion of the slide; and an image capture component to generate control parameters to control movement of a motorized stage and operation of the camera to capture an image of only the identified region through microscopic optics; wherein the low resolution image is inputted into a tissue finding component, and wherein the tissue finding component identifies one or more tissue regions in the low resolution image by applying a filter that incorporates knowledge of typical appearance and location of tissue and non-tissue slide regions and outputs a matrix having values that indicate which slide regions are of interest; and wherein the filter converts a copy of the low resolution image to grayscale and analyzes at least one of mean and standard deviation of local pixel intensities in the grayscale image to generate a threshold value for classifying tissue versus non-tissue regions.