Adversarial Stain Transfer for Histopathology Image Analysis

It is generally recognized that color information is central to the automatic and visual analysis of histopathology tissue slides. In practice, pathologists rely on color, which reflects the presence of specific tissue components, to establish a diagnosis. Similarly, automatic histopathology image analysis algorithms rely on color or intensity measures to extract tissue features. With the increasing access to digitized histopathology images, color variation and its implications have become a critical issue. These variations are the result of not only a variety of factors involved in the preparation of tissue slides but also in the digitization process itself. Consequently, different strategies have been proposed to alleviate stain-related tissue inconsistencies in automatic image analysis systems. Such techniques generally rely on collecting color statistics to perform color matching across images. In this work, we propose a different approach for stain normalization that we refer to as stain transfer. We design a discriminative image analysis model equipped with a stain normalization component that transfers stains across datasets. Our model comprises a generative network that learns data set-specific staining properties and image-specific color transformations as well as a task-specific network (e.g., classifier or segmentation network). The model is trained end-to-end using a multi-objective cost function. We evaluate the proposed approach in the context of automatic histopathology image analysis on three data sets and two different analysis tasks: tissue segmentation and classification. The proposed method achieves superior results in terms of accuracy and quality of normalized images compared to various baselines.