skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Shunxing Bao, Ho Hin"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Multiplex immunofluorescence (MxIF) is an advanced molecular imaging technique that can simultaneously provide biologists with multiple (i.e., more than 20) molecular markers on a single histological tissue section. Unfortunately, due to imaging restrictions, the more routinely used hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) stain is typically unavailable with MxIF on the same tissue section. As biological H&E staining is not feasible, previous efforts have been made to obtain H&E whole slide image (WSI) from MxIF via deep learning empowered virtual staining. However, the tiling effect is a long-lasting problem in high-resolution WSI-wise synthesis. The MxIF to H&E synthesis is no exception. Limited by computational resources, the cross-stain image synthesis is typically performed at the patch-level. Thus, discontinuous intensities might be visually identified along with the patch boundaries assembling all individual patches back to a WSI. In this work, we propose a deep learning based unpaired high-resolution image synthesis method to obtain virtual H&E WSIs from MxIF WSIs (each with 27 markers/stains) with reduced tiling effects. Briefly, we first extend the CycleGAN framework by adding simultaneous nuclei and mucin segmentation supervision as spatial constraints. Then, we introduce a random sliding window shifting strategy during the optimized inference stage to alleviate the tiling effects. The validation results show that our spatially constrained synthesis method achieves a 56% performance gain for the downstream cell segmentation task. The proposed inference method reduces the tiling effects by using 50% fewer computation resources without compromising performance. The proposed random sliding window inference method is a plug-and-play module, which can be generalized and used for other high-resolution WSI image synthesis applications. The source code with our proposed model are available at https://github.com/MASILab/RandomWalkSlidingWindow.git 
    more » « less