Leveraging Adversarial Learning for Pathological Fidelity in Virtual Staining

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Teixeira, José, Klöckner, Pascal, Montezuma, Diana, Cesur, Melis Erdal, Fraga, João, Horlings, Hugo M., Cardoso, Jaime S., Oliveira, Sara P.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Teixeira, José
Klöckner, Pascal
Montezuma, Diana
Cesur, Melis Erdal
Fraga, João
Horlings, Hugo M.
Cardoso, Jaime S.
Oliveira, Sara P.
author_facet Teixeira, José
Klöckner, Pascal
Montezuma, Diana
Cesur, Melis Erdal
Fraga, João
Horlings, Hugo M.
Cardoso, Jaime S.
Oliveira, Sara P.
contents In addition to evaluating tumor morphology using H&E staining, immunohistochemistry is used to assess the presence of specific proteins within the tissue. However, this is a costly and labor-intensive technique, for which virtual staining, as an image-to-image translation task, offers a promising alternative. Although recent, this is an emerging field of research with 64% of published studies just in 2024. Most studies use publicly available datasets of H&E-IHC pairs from consecutive tissue sections. Recognizing the training challenges, many authors develop complex virtual staining models based on conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, but ignore the impact of adversarial loss on the quality of virtual staining. Furthermore, overlooking the issues of model evaluation, they claim improved performance based on metrics such as SSIM and PSNR, which are not sufficiently robust to evaluate the quality of virtually stained images. In this paper, we developed CSSP2P GAN, which we demonstrate to achieve heightened pathological fidelity through a blind pathological expert evaluation. Furthermore, while iteratively developing our model, we study the impact of the adversarial loss and demonstrate its crucial role in the quality of virtually stained images. Finally, while comparing our model with reference works in the field, we underscore the limitations of the currently used evaluation metrics and demonstrate the superior performance of CSSP2P GAN.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18946
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging Adversarial Learning for Pathological Fidelity in Virtual Staining
Teixeira, José
Klöckner, Pascal
Montezuma, Diana
Cesur, Melis Erdal
Fraga, João
Horlings, Hugo M.
Cardoso, Jaime S.
Oliveira, Sara P.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In addition to evaluating tumor morphology using H&E staining, immunohistochemistry is used to assess the presence of specific proteins within the tissue. However, this is a costly and labor-intensive technique, for which virtual staining, as an image-to-image translation task, offers a promising alternative. Although recent, this is an emerging field of research with 64% of published studies just in 2024. Most studies use publicly available datasets of H&E-IHC pairs from consecutive tissue sections. Recognizing the training challenges, many authors develop complex virtual staining models based on conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, but ignore the impact of adversarial loss on the quality of virtual staining. Furthermore, overlooking the issues of model evaluation, they claim improved performance based on metrics such as SSIM and PSNR, which are not sufficiently robust to evaluate the quality of virtually stained images. In this paper, we developed CSSP2P GAN, which we demonstrate to achieve heightened pathological fidelity through a blind pathological expert evaluation. Furthermore, while iteratively developing our model, we study the impact of the adversarial loss and demonstrate its crucial role in the quality of virtually stained images. Finally, while comparing our model with reference works in the field, we underscore the limitations of the currently used evaluation metrics and demonstrate the superior performance of CSSP2P GAN.
title Leveraging Adversarial Learning for Pathological Fidelity in Virtual Staining
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18946