Metric-driven Pre-acquisition Diagnostics for Automated Microscopy Ultraviolet Surface Excitation (MUSE)

In a representative 10×10 MUSE acquisition (100 tiles, 20-megapixel imagery), tile-level metrics yielded mean p99 brightness 0.525 (CV 10.4%), median focus score 0.0333, and median tissue fraction 0.943.

• Why it matters: Automated tiled microscopy can miss alignment, illumination, focus, and coverage problems until after acquisition, risking inconsistent mosaics and wasted imaging.
• What they did: The adaptive pre-acquisition quality-control framework computes brightness, dynamic range, focus, tissue fraction, and exposure error from sparse scout imaging, then uses tile-level metrics to gate rescans.
• The result: Using a conservative exposure-error threshold (|error| > 0.25) flagged 25% of tiles as rescan candidates, enabling early detection of local acquisition errors and targeted rescanning.