arXiv:2606.11846cs.CV2026-06

用层理论解决病理图像虚拟染色的连续性问题,让染色结果更真实。

SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining

论文配图:SheafStain: Sheaf-Theoretic Schrödinger Bridge for Spatially and Biologically Coherent Virtual Staining
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 将视觉基础模型特征视为层结构,保证同一区域在不同上下文下的表现一致
  • 在1024×1024全切片上评估,显著减少拼接边界伪影
  • 适用于需要高保真染色结果的癌症诊断与生物标志物分析

当前虚拟染色方法虽可节省时间和成本,但对千兆像素全切片图像(WSI)进行局部推理时,难以保持空间连续性,导致与真实图像严重不符。尽管病理视觉基础模型(VFMs)具备丰富表征能力,其自注意力机制使相同物理区域在不同全局上下文中产生不一致嵌入,形成‘上下文污染’。本文将其形式化为层论问题:这些嵌入构成预层,违反粘贴公理。为此提出SheafStain,将分类和补丁标记作为类层片段整合进薛定谔桥框架。分类标记确保生物学一致性,补丁标记构建位置空间映射。基于H&E与IHC联合预训练的主干网络生成非退化的跨染色通道,单一VFM特征空间同时指导输入条件与输出染色对齐。不同于以往仅在256×256小块上评估或随机裁剪/缩放1024×1024真实图像的做法,本方法以256×256分辨率推理,但在拼接后的1024×1024输出上评估,涵盖HER2、ER、PR、Ki-67四个指标。结果显示,SheafStain优于六种现有方法,并有效缓解拼接伪影。代码即将开源。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Current virtual staining approaches offer the potential for time- and cost-efficient biomarker quantification in cancer diagnostics and prognostics. However, patch-wise inference for gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) fails to maintain spatial continuity, yielding artifacts that cause catastrophic mismatches with ground-truth images. Although pathology Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) offer rich representations, their self-attention causes varying global contexts to produce inconsistent embeddings for the same physical region. We formalize and validate this ``context contamination'' as a sheaf-theoretic problem where these embeddings form a presheaf that violates the gluing axiom. To address this, we propose SheafStain, a new approach that reinterprets VFM features as sheaf-like sections for spatially and biologically coherent virtual staining. Specifically, SheafStain integrates class and patch tokens into a Schrödinger Bridge framework as sheaf-like sections. While the class token anchors biological consistency, patch tokens form a per-position spatial map. A backbone co-pretrained on Hematoxylin \& Eosin (H\&E) and Immunohistochemistry (IHC) yields non-degenerate cross-stain stalks, so a single VFM feature space supervises both input conditioning and output stain alignment. Departing from prior work that evaluates on isolated $256 \times 256$ patches and either random-crops or resizes the $1024 \times 1024$ ground truth, we translate at $256 \times 256$ and evaluate on the stitched $1024 \times 1024$ outputs across HER2, ER, PR, and Ki-67. SheafStain demonstrates promising results against six prior methods while mitigating patch-boundary stitching artifacts. Code will soon be released.

虚拟染色层理论病理图像医学影像

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