# Histopathological Stain Transfer using Style Transfer Network with Adversarial Loss

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02659 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02659/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Improving Unsupervised Stain-To-Stain Translation using Self-Supervision and Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08837/) (2021)
- [Assessing domain adaptation techniques for mitosis detection in multi-scanner breast cancer histopathology images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00869/) (2021)
- [From Pixels to Pathology: Restoration Diffusion for Diagnostic-Consistent Virtual IHC](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02528/) (2025)
- [MorphGen: Morphology-Guided Representation Learning for Robust Single-Domain Generalization in Histopathological Cancer Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00311/) (2025)
- [Are nuclear masks all you need for improved out-of-domain generalisation? A closer look at cancer classification in histopathology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.09373/) (2024)
- [A protocol for evaluating robustness to H&E staining variation in computational pathology models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12886/) (2026)
- [StainPresetNet: Stain Preset Network for Fast Multi-to-Multi Stain Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.01146/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Deep learning models that are trained on histopathological images obtained from a single lab and/or scanner give poor inference performance on images obtained from another scanner/lab with a different staining protocol. In recent years, there has been a good amount of research done for image stain normalization to address this issue. In this work, we present a novel approach for the stain normalization problem using fast neural style transfer coupled with adversarial loss. We also propose a novel stain transfer generator network based on High-Resolution Network (HRNet) which requires less training time and gives good generalization with few paired training images of reference stain and test stain. This approach has been tested on Whole Slide Images (WSIs) obtained from 8 different labs, where images from one lab were treated as a reference stain. A deep learning model was trained on this stain and the rest of the images were transferred to it using the corresponding stain transfer generator network. Experimentation suggests that this approach is able to successfully perform stain normalization with good visual quality and provides better inference performance compared to not applying stain normalization.