Abstract: Today's technology allows montage images of large areas to be captured, stored and displayed at the resolution limit of the microscope optics. The invention reduces the overall time to capture a microscope slide by reducing the overhead associated with refocusing the optics at each tile location. Using a macroscopic image of the region to be scanned, representative focus positions are selected based on a predefined set of image characteristics. Prior to montage scanning, these focus positions are placed under the microscope optics and a best-focus position determined. A surface is fit to the resulting three-dimensional data. The parameters that define this surface are feed into the scanning control component to allow high-quality focused images to be acquired throughout the scanning process, eliminating the required stop, refocus, acquire image processing steps used in traditional montage imaging systems.