ACROBAT - a multi-stain breast cancer histological whole-slide-image data set from routine diagnostics for computational pathology

The WSIs in this data set are accompanied by a data table with one row for each WSI, specifying an anonymised patient ID, the stain or IHC antibody type of each WSI, as well as the magnification and microns per pixel at each available resolution level. Automated registration algorithm performance evaluation is possible through the ACROBAT challenge website based on over 37,000 landmark pair annotations from 13 annotators.

While the primary purpose of this data set was the development and evaluation of WSI registration methods, this data set has the potential to facilitate further research in the context of computational pathology, for example in the areas of stain-guided learning, virtual staining, unsupervised learning and stain-independent models. The data set consists of three subsets, the training, validation and test set, based on the ACROBAT WSI registration challenge.

There are 750 cases in the training set, for each of which one H&E WSI and one to four IHC WSIs are available, with 3406 WSIs in total. The validation set consists of 100 cases with 200 WSIs in total and the test set of 303 cases with 606 WSIs in total. Both for the validation and test set, one H&E WSI as well as one randomly selected IHC WSI is available.

WSIs were anonymised by deleting the associated macro images, by generating filenames with random case IDs and by overwriting meta data fields with potentially personal information. Hamamatsu NDPI files were then converted using libvips (libvips.org/). WSIs are available as generic tiled TIFF WSIs (openslide.org/formats/generic-tiff/) at 10X magnification and lower image levels.

The data set is available for download in seven separate ZIP archives, five for the training data (train_part1.zip (71.47 GB), train_part2.zip (70.59 GB), train_part3.zip (75.91 GB), train_part4.zip (71.63 GB) and train_part5.zip (69.09 GB)), one for the validation data (valid.zip 21.79 GB) and one for the test data (test.zip 68.11 GB). File listings and checksums in SHA1 format are available for checking archive/data integrity when downloading.

While it would be helpful to notify SND of any publications using this data set by sending an email to request@snd.gu.se, please note that this is not required to use the data.