Beer-Lambert Autoencoder for Unsupervised Stain Representation Learning and Deconvolution in Multi-immunohistochemical Brightfield Histology Images

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Eastwood, Mark, McKee, Thomas, Hu, Zedong, Tejpar, Sabine, Minhas, Fayyaz
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Eastwood, Mark
McKee, Thomas
Hu, Zedong
Tejpar, Sabine
Minhas, Fayyaz
author_facet Eastwood, Mark
McKee, Thomas
Hu, Zedong
Tejpar, Sabine
Minhas, Fayyaz
contents Separating the contributions of individual chromogenic stains in RGB histology whole slide images (WSIs) is essential for stain normalization, quantitative assessment of marker expression, and cell-level readouts in immunohistochemistry (IHC). Classical Beer-Lambert (BL) color deconvolution is well-established for two- or three-stain settings, but becomes under-determined and unstable for multiplex IHC (mIHC) with K>3 chromogens. We present a simple, data-driven encoder-decoder architecture that learns cohort-specific stain characteristics for mIHC RGB WSIs and yields crisp, well-separated per-stain concentration maps. The encoder is a compact U-Net that predicts K nonnegative concentration channels; the decoder is a differentiable BL forward model with a learnable stain matrix initialized from typical chromogen hues. Training is unsupervised with a perceptual reconstruction objective augmented by loss terms that discourage unnecessary stain mixing. On a colorectal mIHC panel comprising 5 stains (H, CDX2, MUC2, MUC5, CD8) we show excellent RGB reconstruction, and significantly reduced inter-channel bleed-through compared with matrix-based deconvolution. Code and model are available at https://github.com/measty/StainQuant.git.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_11336
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beer-Lambert Autoencoder for Unsupervised Stain Representation Learning and Deconvolution in Multi-immunohistochemical Brightfield Histology Images
Eastwood, Mark
McKee, Thomas
Hu, Zedong
Tejpar, Sabine
Minhas, Fayyaz
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Separating the contributions of individual chromogenic stains in RGB histology whole slide images (WSIs) is essential for stain normalization, quantitative assessment of marker expression, and cell-level readouts in immunohistochemistry (IHC). Classical Beer-Lambert (BL) color deconvolution is well-established for two- or three-stain settings, but becomes under-determined and unstable for multiplex IHC (mIHC) with K>3 chromogens. We present a simple, data-driven encoder-decoder architecture that learns cohort-specific stain characteristics for mIHC RGB WSIs and yields crisp, well-separated per-stain concentration maps. The encoder is a compact U-Net that predicts K nonnegative concentration channels; the decoder is a differentiable BL forward model with a learnable stain matrix initialized from typical chromogen hues. Training is unsupervised with a perceptual reconstruction objective augmented by loss terms that discourage unnecessary stain mixing. On a colorectal mIHC panel comprising 5 stains (H, CDX2, MUC2, MUC5, CD8) we show excellent RGB reconstruction, and significantly reduced inter-channel bleed-through compared with matrix-based deconvolution. Code and model are available at https://github.com/measty/StainQuant.git.
title Beer-Lambert Autoencoder for Unsupervised Stain Representation Learning and Deconvolution in Multi-immunohistochemical Brightfield Histology Images
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.11336