# SCFANet: Style Distribution Constraint Feature Alignment Network For Pathological Staining Translation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00490 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00490/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 36 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05233/) (2021)
- [A Style-Based Generator Architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.04948/) (2018)
- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Perceptual Losses for Real-Time Style Transfer and Super-Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08155/) (2016)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [StarGAN: Unified Generative Adversarial Networks for Multi-Domain Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09020/) (2017)
- [Contrastive Learning for Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.15651/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.00848/) (2017)
- [Diverse Image-to-Image Translation via Disentangled Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00948/) (2018)
- [Fast and Accurate Image Super-Resolution with Deep Laplacian Pyramid Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01992/) (2017)
- [Missing MRI Pulse Sequence Synthesis using Multi-Modal Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12200/) (2019)
- [Deep MR to CT Synthesis using Unpaired Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01155/) (2017)
- [StainGAN: Stain Style Transfer for Digital Histological Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.01601/) (2018)
- [BCI: Breast Cancer Immunohistochemical Image Generation through Pyramid Pix2pix](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.11425/) (2022)
- [Cross-modality image synthesis from unpaired data using CycleGAN: Effects of gradient consistency loss and training data size](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.06629/) (2018)
- [Adaptive Supervised PatchNCE Loss for Learning H&E-to-IHC Stain Translation with Inconsistent Groundtruth Image Pairs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06193/) (2023)
- [DiamondGAN: Unified Multi-Modal Generative Adversarial Networks for MRI Sequences Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12894/) (2019)
- [Styleformer: Transformer based Generative Adversarial Networks with Style Vector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07023/) (2021)
- [Pathological Semantics-Preserving Learning for H&E-to-IHC Virtual Staining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03655/) (2024)
- [Predicting Ki67, ER, PR, and HER2 Statuses from H&E-stained Breast Cancer Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01982/) (2023)
- [Breast Cancer Immunohistochemical Image Generation: a Benchmark Dataset and Challenge Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03546/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Immunohistochemical (IHC) staining serves as a valuable technique for detecting specific antigens or proteins through antibody-mediated visualization. However, the IHC staining process is both time-consuming and costly. To address these limitations, the application of deep learning models for direct translation of cost-effective Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained images into IHC stained images has emerged as an efficient solution. Nevertheless, the conversion from H&E to IHC images presents significant challenges, primarily due to alignment discrepancies between image pairs and the inherent diversity in IHC staining style patterns. To overcome these challenges, we propose the Style Distribution Constraint Feature Alignment Network (SCFANet), which incorporates two innovative modules: the Style Distribution Constrainer (SDC) and Feature Alignment Learning (FAL). The SDC ensures consistency between the generated and target images' style distributions while integrating cycle consistency loss to maintain structural consistency. To mitigate the complexity of direct image-to-image translation, the FAL module decomposes the end-to-end translation task into two subtasks: image reconstruction and feature alignment. Furthermore, we ensure pathological consistency between generated and target images by maintaining pathological pattern consistency and Optical Density (OD) uniformity. Extensive experiments conducted on the Breast Cancer Immunohistochemical (BCI) dataset demonstrate that our SCFANet model outperforms existing methods, achieving precise transformation of H&E-stained images into their IHC-stained counterparts. The proposed approach not only addresses the technical challenges in H&E to IHC image translation but also provides a robust framework for accurate and efficient stain conversion in pathological analysis.