arXiv:2508.02528eess.IVcs.CV2025-08被引 5

用扩散模型将H&E切片转为诊断一致的虚拟IHC,提升病理分析效率。

From Pixels to Pathology: Restoration Diffusion for Diagnostic-Consistent Virtual IHC

  • 将虚拟染色视为图像修复任务,结合残差与噪声路径保持组织结构
  • 在BCI数据集上生成的虚拟IHC在视觉和诊断一致性上均达当前最优
  • 提出新评估指标SFS,可应对空间错位和分类不确定性的挑战

苏木精-伊红(H&E)染色是组织形态学评估的临床标准,但缺乏分子水平诊断信息。相比之下,免疫组化(IHC)能提供关键的生物标志物表达信息(如乳腺癌分级中的HER2状态),但成本高、耗时长,限制了其在时间敏感临床流程中的应用。为弥补这一差距,从H&E到IHC的虚拟染色成为有前景的替代方案,但仍面临两大核心挑战:(1) 合成图像与存在空间错位的IHC真实样本之间缺乏公平评估;(2) 翻译过程中难以保持结构完整性和生物学变异性。为此,本文提出一个端到端框架,包含生成与评估两部分。引入Star-Diff——一种结构感知的染色修复扩散模型,将虚拟染色重构为图像修复任务。通过结合残差与噪声生成路径,该模型在保持组织结构的同时模拟真实的生物标志物变异。为评估生成IHC图块的诊断一致性,提出语义保真度评分(SFS),该指标基于生物标志物分类准确率,量化类别级语义退化情况。相比传统像素级指标(如SSIM、PSNR),SFS对空间错位和分类器不确定性具有鲁棒性。在BCI数据集上的实验表明,Star-Diff在视觉保真度和诊断相关性方面均达到当前最优(SOTA)性能。其推理快速且临床对齐性强,适用于术中虚拟IHC合成等实际场景。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining is the clinical standard for assessing tissue morphology, but it lacks molecular-level diagnostic information. In contrast, immunohistochemistry (IHC) provides crucial insights into biomarker expression, such as HER2 status for breast cancer grading, but remains costly and time-consuming, limiting its use in time-sensitive clinical workflows. To address this gap, virtual staining from H&E to IHC has emerged as a promising alternative, yet faces two core challenges: (1) Lack of fair evaluation of synthetic images against misaligned IHC ground truths, and (2) preserving structural integrity and biological variability during translation. To this end, we present an end-to-end framework encompassing both generation and evaluation in this work. We introduce Star-Diff, a structure-aware staining restoration diffusion model that reformulates virtual staining as an image restoration task. By combining residual and noise-based generation pathways, Star-Diff maintains tissue structure while modeling realistic biomarker variability. To evaluate the diagnostic consistency of the generated IHC patches, we propose the Semantic Fidelity Score (SFS), a clinical-grading-task-driven metric that quantifies class-wise semantic degradation based on biomarker classification accuracy. Unlike pixel-level metrics such as SSIM and PSNR, SFS remains robust under spatial misalignment and classifier uncertainty. Experiments on the BCI dataset demonstrate that Star-Diff achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both visual fidelity and diagnostic relevance. With rapid inference and strong clinical alignment,it presents a practical solution for applications such as intraoperative virtual IHC synthesis.

虚拟染色扩散模型病理分析医学图像生成

Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。