A Multi-Perspective Self-Supervised Generative Adversarial Network for FS to FFPE Stain Transfer

In clinical practice, frozen section (FS) images can be utilized to obtain the immediate pathological results of the patients in operation due to their fast production speed. However, compared with the formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded (FFPE) images, the FS images greatly suffer from poor quality. Thus, it is of great significance to transfer the FS image to the FFPE one, which enables pathologists to observe high-quality images in operation. However, obtaining the paired FS and FFPE images is quite hard, so it is difficult to obtain accurate results using supervised methods. Apart from this, the FS to FFPE stain transfer faces many challenges. Firstly, the number and position of nuclei scattered throughout the image are hard to maintain during the transfer process. Secondly, transferring the blurry FS images to the clear FFPE ones is quite challenging. Thirdly, compared with the center regions of each patch, the edge regions are harder to transfer. To overcome these problems, a multi-perspective self-supervised GAN, incorporating three auxiliary tasks, is proposed to improve the performance of FS to FFPE stain transfer. Concretely, a nucleus consistency constraint is designed to enable the high-fidelity of nuclei, an FFPE guided image deblurring is proposed for improving the clarity, and a multi-field-of-view consistency constraint is designed to better generate the edge regions. Objective indicators and pathologists’ evaluation for experiments on the five datasets across different countries have demonstrated the effectiveness of our method. In addition, the validation in the downstream task of microsatellite instability prediction has also proved the performance improvement by transferring the FS images to FFPE ones. Our code link is https://github.com/linyiyang98/Self-Supervised-FS2FFPE.git.