Stain standardization capsule for application-driven histopathological image normalization

Stain standardization capsule for application-driven histopathological image normalization 1269 640 Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (JBHI)

Color consistency is crucial to developing robust deep learning methods for histopathological image analysis. With the increasing application of digital histopathological images, the deep learning methods are likely developed based on the data from multiple medical centers. This requirement makes it a challenging task to normalize the color variance of histopathological images from different medical centers. In this paper, we proposed a novel color standardization module named stain standardization capsule based on the paradigm of capsule network and the corresponding dynamic routing algorithm. The proposed module can learn and generate uniform stain separation outputs for histopathological images in various color appearance without the reference to manually selected template images. The proposed module is light and can be trained end-to-end with the application-driven CNN model. The proposed method was validated on three histopathology datasets and a cytology dataset, and was compared with state-of-the-art methods. The experimental results have demonstrated that the SSC module is effective in improving the performance of histopathological image analysis and has achieved the best performance in the compared methods.