Stain Consistency Learning: Handling Stain Variation for Automatic Digital Pathology Segmentation

Abstract

Stain variation poses a major challenge for automated digital pathology. Numerous techniques address this issue, yet show limited success, especially outside H&E stains and classification tasks. We propose Stain Consistency Learning (SCL), combining stain-specific augmentation and a novel consistency loss to learn stain-invariant features. We conduct the first large-scale evaluation of ten methods on Masson’s trichrome and H&E datasets for segmentation. Our results demonstrate that traditional stain normalization offers little benefit, while stain augmentation and adversarial learning significantly improve performance. SCL consistently outperforms all other methods.