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Histopathological image analysis is an examination of tissue under a light microscope for cancerous disease diagnosis. Computer-assisted diagnosis (CAD) systems work well by diagnosing cancer from histopathology images. However, stain variability in histopathology images is inevitable due to the use of different staining processes, operator ability, and scanner specifications. These stain variations present in histopathology images affect the accuracy of the CAD systems. Various stain normalization techniques have been developed to cope with inter-variability issues, allowing standardizing the appearance of images. However, in stain normalization, these methods rely on the single reference image rather than incorporate color distributions of the entire dataset. In this paper, we design a novel machine learning-based model that takes advantage of whole dataset distributions as well as color statistics of a single target image instead of relying only on a single target image. The proposed deep model, called stain acclimation generative adversarial network (SA-GAN), consists of one generator and two discriminators. The generator maps the input images from the source domain to the target domain. Among discriminators, the first discriminator forces the generated images to maintain the color patterns as of target domain. While second discriminator forces the generated images to preserve the structure contents as of source domain. The proposed model is trained using a color attribute metric, extracted from a selected template image. Therefore, the designed model not only learns dataset-specific staining properties but also image-specific textural contents. Evaluated results on four different histopathology datasets show the efficacy of SA-GAN to acclimate stain contents and enhance the quality of normalization by obtaining the highest values of performance metrics. Additionally, the proposed method is also evaluated for multiclass cancer type classification task, showing a 6.9% improvement in accuracy on ICIAR 2018 hidden test data.

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This research is supported in part by the joint fund of basic and applied basic research fund of Guangdong province under grant number 2020A1515110498.

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