Unsupervised Multi-Domain Progressive Stain Transfer Guided by Style Encoding Dictionary

In histopathology, the tissue slides are usually stained by common H&E stain or special stains (MAS, PAS, and PASM, etc.) to clearly show specific tissue structures. The rapid development of deep learning provides a good solution to generate virtual staining images to significantly reduce the time and labor costs associated with histochemical staining. However, most existing methods need to train a special model for every two stains, which consumes a lot of computing resources with the increasing of staining types. To address this problem, we propose an unsupervised multi-domain stain transfer method, GramGAN, which realizes the progressive transfer through cascaded Style-Guided blocks. For each Style-Guided block, we design a style encoding dictionary to characterize and store all the staining style information. In addition, we propose a Renyi entropy-based regularization term to improve the discrimination ability of different styles. The experimental results show that our method can realize accurate transferring among multiple staining styles with better performance. Furthermore, we build and publish a special stained image dataset suitable for glomeruli segmentation (including H&E staining), where the accuracy of glomeruli detection and segmentation can be significantly improved after transferring H&E-stained images to PAS-stained and PASM-stained ones by our method. The code is publicly available at: https://github.com/xianchaoguan/GramGAN.