Stain deconvolution of histology images via independent component analysis in the wavelet domain

Abstract

With the ubiquity of digital slide scanners, histology image analysis is rapidly emerging as an active area of research. Several histology image analysis algorithms such as those for mitotic cell detection, nuclei segmentation and hormone receptors scoring depend on colour information obtained from images of the scanned slides. However, different standards followed by different labs and the technical variation among different scanners result in stain inconsistency in histology images. Thus, applications that use colour information may fail when they are applied to images with different appearance of stain colours. In this paper, we propose a novel method to estimate the so called stain matrix via independent component analysis in the wavelet domain for stain deconvolution in histology images. Experimental results demonstrate stable and more accurate stain deconvolution results as compared to other recently proposed algorithms. 2016 IEEE.