DeReStainer: H&E to IHC Pathological Image Translation via Decoupled Staining Channels
This work addresses the high cost of IHC staining by enabling conversion from widely available H&E images, potentially improving early breast cancer detection for patients and clinicians.
The authors tackled the problem of converting H&E-stained pathological images to IHC-stained images for breast cancer diagnosis, specifically targeting HER2 status detection, and their method outperformed previous open-sourced methods in image quality and semantic metrics.
Breast cancer is a highly fatal disease among cancers in women, and early detection is crucial for treatment. HER2 status, a valuable diagnostic marker based on Immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining, is instrumental in determining breast cancer status. The high cost of IHC staining and the ubiquity of Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining make the conversion from H&E to IHC staining essential. In this article, we propose a destain-restain framework for converting H&E staining to IHC staining, leveraging the characteristic that H&E staining and IHC staining of the same tissue sections share the Hematoxylin channel. We further design loss functions specifically for Hematoxylin and Diaminobenzidin (DAB) channels to generate IHC images exploiting insights from separated staining channels. Beyond the benchmark metrics on BCI contest, we have developed semantic information metrics for the HER2 level. The experimental results demonstrated that our method outperforms previous open-sourced methods in terms of image intrinsic property and semantic information.