Virtually Redying Histological Images with Generative Adversarial Networks to Facilitate Unsupervised Segmentation: A Proof-of-Concept Study

Abstract

Approaches relying on adversarial networks facilitate image-to-image-translation based on unpaired training and thereby open new possibilities for special tasks in image analysis. We propose a methodology to improve segmentability of histological images by making use of image-to-image translation. We generate virtual stains and exploit the additional information during segmentation. Specifically a very basic pixel-based segmentation approach is applied in order to focus on the information content available on pixel-level and to avoid any bias which might be introduced by more elaborated techniques. The results of this proof-of-concept trial indicate a performance gain compared to segmentation with the source stain only. Further experiments including more powerful supervised state-of-the-art machine learning approaches and larger evaluation data sets need to follow.