USIGAN: Unbalanced Self-Information Feature Transport for Weakly Paired Image IHC Virtual Staining

作者：Yue Peng, Bing Xiong, Fuqiang Chen, Deboch Eyob Abera, Ranran Zhang, Wanming Hu, Jing Cai, Wenjian Qin · 发表于：IEEE Transactions on Image Processing · 年份：2026 · DOI：10.1109/tip.2026.3679993 · 被引用次数：1 · 研究领域：AI in cancer detection、Generative Adversarial Networks and Image Synthesis、Cell Image Analysis Techniques

Immunohistochemical (IHC) virtual staining is a task that generates virtual IHC images from H&E images while maintaining pathological semantic consistency with adjacent slices. This task aims to achieve cross-domain mapping between morphological structures and staining patterns through generative models, providing an efficient and cost-effective solution for pathological analysis. However, under weakly paired conditions, spatial heterogeneity between adjacent slices presents significant challenges. This can lead to inaccurate one-to-many mappings and generate results that are inconsistent with the pathological semantics of adjacent slices. To address this issue, we propose a novel unbalanced self-information feature transport for IHC virtual staining, named USIGAN, which extracts global morphological semantics without relying on positional correspondence. By removing weakly paired terms in the joint marginal distribution, we effectively mitigate the impact of weak pairing on joint distributions, thereby significantly improving the content consistency and pathological semantic consistency of the generated results. Moreover, we design the Unbalanced Optimal Transport Consistency Mining (UOT-CTM) mechanism and the Pathology Self-Correspondence Mining (PC-SCM) mechanism to construct correlation matrices between H&E and generated IHC in image-level and real IHC and generated IHC image sets in intra-group level. Experiments conducted on two publicly available datasets demonstrate t...