mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

StainGAN: Stain Style Transfer for Digital Histological Images

arXiv 1804.01601 ↗First posted 4 Apr 2018cs.CVcited by 68

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Digitized Histological diagnosis is in increasing demand. However, color variations due to various factors are imposing obstacles to the diagnosis process. The problem of stain color variations is a well-defined problem with many proposed solutions. Most of these solutions are highly dependent on a reference template slide. We propose a deep-learning solution inspired by CycleGANs that is trained end-to-end, eliminating the need for an expert to pick a representative reference slide. Our approach showed superior results quantitatively and qualitatively against the state of the art methods (10% improvement visually using SSIM). We further validated our method on a clinical use-case, namely Breast Cancer tumor classification, showing 12% increase in AUC. The code will be made publicly available.

Key facts. Cited by 68 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 4 Apr 2018.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 7; 2022: 17; 2023: 18; 2024: 9; 2025: 12; 2026: 5.

68 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2022BCI: Breast Cancer Immunohistochemical Image Generation through Pyramid Pix2pixcited by 61
  2. 2022Multiple Instance Learning for Digital Pathology: A Review on the State-of-the-Art, Limitations & Future Potentialcited by 54
  3. 2022RandStainNA: Learning Stain-Agnostic Features from Histology Slides by Bridging Stain Augmentation and Normalizationcited by 32
  4. 2021Structure-Preserving Multi-Domain Stain Color Augmentation using Style-Transfer with Disentangled Representationscited by 31
  5. 2021Algorithm Fairness in AI for Medicine and Healthcarecited by 21
  6. 2025A Survey on Computational Pathology Foundation Models: Datasets, Adaptation Strategies, and Evaluation Taskscited by 15
  7. 2022Test-time image-to-image translation ensembling improves out-of-distribution generalization in histopathologycited by 13
  8. 2022Federated Stain Normalization for Computational Pathologycited by 11
  9. 2023Structural Cycle GAN for Virtual Immunohistochemistry Staining of Gland Markers in the Coloncited by 10
  10. 2024VIMs: Virtual Immunohistochemistry Multiplex staining via Text-to-Stain Diffusion Trained on Uniplex Stainscited by 10
  11. 2022From Modern CNNs to Vision Transformers: Assessing the Performance, Robustness, and Classification Strategies of Deep Learning Models in Histopathologycited by 9
  12. 2021Improving Unsupervised Stain-To-Stain Translation using Self-Supervision and Meta-Learningcited by 7
38 more
  1. 2022RestainNet: a self-supervised digital re-stainer for stain normalizationcited by 7
  2. 2022Deep Learning Generates Synthetic Cancer Histology for Explainability and Educationcited by 7
  3. 2023Digital staining in optical microscopy using deep learning -- a reviewcited by 7
  4. 2023A comparative evaluation of image-to-image translation methods for stain transfer in histopathologycited by 7
  5. 2023Breast Cancer Immunohistochemical Image Generation: a Benchmark Dataset and Challenge Reviewcited by 7
  6. 2023ContriMix: Scalable stain color augmentation for domain generalization without domain labels in digital pathologycited by 7
  7. 2025Pathology Foundation Models are Scanner Sensitive: Benchmark and Mitigation with Contrastive ScanGen Losscited by 7
  8. 2024Generating Seamless Virtual Immunohistochemical Whole Slide Images with Content and Color Consistencycited by 6
  9. 2022H&E-adversarial network: a convolutional neural network to learn stain-invariant features through Hematoxylin & Eosin regressioncited by 5
  10. 2022MultiPathGAN: Structure Preserving Stain Normalization using Unsupervised Multi-domain Adversarial Network with Perception Losscited by 4
  11. 2023Multi-domain stain normalization for digital pathology: A cycle-consistent adversarial network for whole slide imagescited by 4
  12. 2023Domain adaptation using optimal transport for invariant learning using histopathology datasetscited by 4
  13. 2024Dataset Distillation for Histopathology Image Classificationcited by 4
  14. 2021A generative adversarial approach to facilitate archival-quality histopathologic diagnoses from frozen tissue sectionscited by 3
  15. 2022Towards Measuring Domain Shift in Histopathological Stain Translation in an Unsupervised Mannercited by 3
  16. 2022Pseudo-Data based Self-Supervised Federated Learning for Classification of Histopathological Imagescited by 3
  17. 2022HistoStarGAN: A Unified Approach to Stain Normalisation, Stain Transfer and Stain Invariant Segmentation in Renal Histopathologycited by 3
  18. 2023Generative Adversarial Networks for Stain Normalisation in Histopathologycited by 3
  19. 2022Deep learning based domain adaptation for mitochondria segmentation on EM volumescited by 2
  20. 2022FUSION: Fully Unsupervised Test-Time Stain Adaptation via Fused Normalization Statisticscited by 2
  21. 2023Standardized CycleGAN training for unsupervised stain adaptation in invasive carcinoma classification for breast histopathologycited by 2
  22. 2023Learning to Generalize towards Unseen Domains via a Content-Aware Style Invariant Model for Disease Detection from Chest X-rayscited by 2
  23. 2023A Laplacian Pyramid Based Generative H&E Stain Augmentation Networkcited by 2
  24. 2024ReStainGAN: Leveraging IHC to IF Stain Domain Translation for in-silico Data Generationcited by 2
  25. 2024Auxiliary CycleGAN-guidance for Task-Aware Domain Translation from Duplex to Monoplex IHC Imagescited by 2
  26. 2024Mask-guided cross-image attention for zero-shot in-silico histopathologic image generation with a diffusion modelcited by 2
  27. 2021Histo-fetch -- On-the-fly processing of gigapixel whole slide images simplifies and speeds neural network trainingcited by 1
  28. 2023Histopathological Image Analysis with Style-Augmented Feature Domain Mixing for Improved Generalizationcited by 1
  29. 2024Data Alchemy: Mitigating Cross-Site Model Variability Through Test Time Data Calibrationcited by 1
  30. 2024Are nuclear masks all you need for improved out-of-domain generalisation? A closer look at cancer classification in histopathologycited by 1
  31. 2025MorphGen: Morphology-Guided Representation Learning for Robust Single-Domain Generalization in Histopathological Cancer Classificationcited by 1
  32. 2026FedStain: Modeling Higher-Order Stain Statistics for Federated Domain Generalization in Computational Pathologycited by 1
  33. 2021Deep learning-based bias transfer for overcoming laboratory differences of microscopic imagescited by 0
  34. 2021Multi-Channel Auto-Encoders and a Novel Dataset for Learning Domain Invariant Representations of Histopathology Imagescited by 0
  35. 2022Adversarial Stain Transfer to Study the Effect of Color Variation on Cell Instance Segmentationcited by 0
  36. 2022H&E Stain Normalization using U-Netcited by 0
  37. 2023Distribution Aligned Diffusion and Prototype-guided network for Unsupervised Domain Adaptive Segmentationcited by 0
  38. 2023Improving Stain Invariance of CNNs for Segmentation by Fusing Channel Attention and Domain-Adversarial Trainingcited by 0

50 most cited of 68 All 68 (JSON)