A fast and scalable pipeline for stain normalization of whole-slide images in histopathology

Abstract

Stain normalization is one of the main tasks in the processing pipeline of computer-aided diagnosis systems in modern digital pathology. Some of the challenges in this tasks are memory and runtime bottlenecks associated with large image datasets. In this work, we present a scalable and fast pipeline for stain normalization using a state-of-the-art unsupervised method based on stain-vector estimation. The proposed system supports single-node and distributed implementations. Based on a highly-optimized engine, our architecture enables high-speed and large-scale processing of high-magnification whole-slide images (WSI). We demonstrate the performance of the system using measurements from different datasets. Moreover, by using a novel pixel-sampling optimization we show lower processing time per image than the scanning time of ultrafast WSI scanners with the single-node implementation and additional 3.44 average speed-up with the 4-nodes distributed pipeline.