Hematoxylin and Eosin stained histopathology image analysis is essential for the diagnosis and study of complicated diseases such as cancer. Existing state-of-the-art approaches demand extensive amount of supervised training data from trained pathologists. In this work we synthesize in an unsupervised manner, large histopathology image datasets, suitable for supervised training tasks. We propose a unified pipeline that: a) generates a set of initial synthetic histopathology images with paired information about the nuclei such as segmentation masks; b) refines the initial synthetic images through a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to reference styles; c) trains a task-specific CNN and boosts the performance of the task-specific CNN with on-the-fly generated adversarial examples. Our main contribution is that the synthetic images are not only realistic, but also representative (in reference styles) and relatively challenging for training task-specific CNNs. We test our method for nucleus segmentation using images from four cancer types. When no supervised data exists for a cancer type, our method without supervision cost significantly outperforms supervised methods which perform across-cancer generalization. Even when supervised data exists for all cancer types, our approach without supervision cost performs better than supervised methods.

本研究提出了一种无监督学习的方法，利用生成对抗网络（GAN）生成与真实组织学图像相似的组织学图像，以提高分类CNN的性能，该方法不仅能在缺少监督数据的情况下有效地进行癌症诊断，而且对于含有监督数据的情况仍能表现出色。

无监督组织病理图像合成