Pathological specimens are prepared through work processes including excision, fixation, embedding, sectioning, staining, and mounting, which involve a lot of man power. Therefore, pathological specimens prepared by different persons or using different types of institution equipment will be different. As a result, doctors' diagnosis based on images captured of pathological specimens may use various patterns of pathological images, which makes it difficult to provide a uniform diagnostic criterion.
Conventionally, a technique disclosed by Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. H5-500152 is known as a technique related to a quantitative analysis on pathological images. The technique of Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. H5-500152 includes automatically detecting cell nuclei and quantitatively determining a proliferation index of cells. Furthermore, the use of different staining techniques on the cell nuclei and proliferation substances enables accurate detection even in the case where test objects overlap.