# CREATE-FFPE: Cross-Resolution Compensated and Multi-Frequency Enhanced FS-to-FFPE Stain Transfer for Intraoperative IHC Images

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00697 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00697/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00667/) (2022)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Demystifying MMD GANs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01401/) (2018)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [HF-NeuS: Improved Surface Reconstruction Using High-Frequency Details](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07850/) (2022)
- [Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation via Neural Schr"odinger Bridge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15086/) (2023)
- [How good is my GAN?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09499/) (2018)
- [Machine Learning Methods for Histopathological Image Analysis: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.03889/) (2021)
- [A generative adversarial approach to facilitate archival-quality histopathologic diagnoses from frozen tissue sections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10550/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In the immunohistochemical (IHC) analysis during surgery, frozen-section (FS) images are used to determine the benignity or malignancy of the tumor. However, FS image faces problems such as image contamination and poor nuclear detail, which may disturb the pathologist's diagnosis. In contrast, formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) image has a higher staining quality, but it requires quite a long time to prepare and thus is not feasible during surgery. To help pathologists observe IHC images with high quality in surgery, this paper proposes a Cross-REsolution compensATed and multi-frequency Enhanced FS-to-FFPE (CREATE-FFPE) stain transfer framework, which is the first FS-to-FFPE method for the intraoperative IHC images. To solve the slide contamination and poor nuclear detail mentioned above, we propose the cross-resolution compensation module (CRCM) and the wavelet detail guidance module (WDGM). Specifically, CRCM compensates for information loss due to contamination by providing more tissue information across multiple resolutions, while WDGM produces the desirable details in a wavelet way, and the details can be used to guide the stain transfer to be more precise. Experiments show our method can beat all the competing methods on our dataset. In addition, the FID has decreased by 44.4%, and KID*100 has decreased by 71.2% by adding the proposed CRCM and WDGM in ablation studies, and the performance of a downstream microsatellite instability prediction task with public dataset can be greatly improved by performing our FS-to-FFPE stain transfer.