Histopathological cancer diagnosis is based on visual examination of stained
tissue slides. Hematoxylin and eosin (H\&E) is a standard stain routinely
employed worldwide. It is easy to acquire and cost effective, but cells and
tissue components show low-contrast with varying tones of dark blue and pink,
which makes difficult visual assessments, digital image analysis, and
quantifications. These limitations can be overcome by IHC staining of target
proteins of the tissue slide. IHC provides a selective, high-contrast imaging
of cells and tissue components, but their use is largely limited by a
significantly more complex laboratory processing and high cost. We proposed a
conditional CycleGAN (cCGAN) network to transform the H\&E stained images into
IHC stained images, facilitating virtual IHC staining on the same slide. This
data-driven method requires only a limited amount of labelled data but will
generate pixel level segmentation results. The proposed cCGAN model improves
the original network \cite{zhu_unpaired_2017} by adding category conditions and
introducing two structural loss functions, which realize a multi-subdomain
translation and improve the translation accuracy as well. % need to give
reasons here. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the
original method in unpaired image translation with multi-subdomains. We also
explore the potential of unpaired images to image translation method applied on
other histology images related tasks with different staining techniques.

本文提出了一种基于条件 CycleGAN 网络的方法，将 H＆E 染色图像转换为 IHC 染色图像，实现同一切片的虚拟 IHC 染色，并展示了该方法在图像转换方面的优越性。