Boosting FFPE-to-HE Virtual Staining with Cell Semantics from Pretrained Segmentation Model

Histopathological samples are typically processed by formalin fixation and paraffin embedding (FFPE) for long-term preservation. To visualize the blurry structures of cells and tissue in FFPE slides, hematoxylin and eosin (HE) staining is commonly utilized, a process that involves sophisticated laboratory facilities and complicated procedures. Recently, virtual staining realized by generative models has been widely utilized. The blurry cell structure in FFPE slides poses challenges to well-studied FFPE-to-HE virtual staining. However, most existing researches overlook this issue. In this paper, we propose a framework for boosting FFPE-to-HE virtual staining with cell semantics from pretrained cell segmentation models (PCSM) as the well-trained PCSM has learned effective representation for cell structure, which contains richer cell semantics than that from a generative model. Thus, we learn from PCSM by utilizing the high-level and low-level semantics of real and virtual images. Specifically, We propose to utilize PCSM to extract multiple-scale latent representations from real and virtual images and align them. Moreover, we introduce the low-level cell location guidance for generative models, informed by PCSM. We conduct extensive experiments on our collected dataset. The results demonstrate a significant improvement of our method over the existing network qualitatively and quantitatively. Code is available at https://github.com/huyihuang/FFPE-to-HE .