Graph-Semantic Guided Learning for Virtual Immunohistochemistry Staining on Consecutive Histology Sections

Abstract

Virtual Immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining technology employs generative models to directly synthesize IHC images from Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) images, reducing reliance on chemical staining while improving diagnostic efficiency and reducing costs. However, existing virtual staining methods relying on adjacent sections face two critical challenges: insufficient mining of pathological semantics and the spatial misalignment of pathological semantics due to physical discrepancies between sections. To address these, we propose GSGStain, a Graph-Semantic Guided Learning for virtual Staining. Our method innovatively transforms the problem from pixel space to graph space, enabling semantic noise correction for spatial misalignment features. Specifically, to capture the rich pathological semantics, we construct a cell graph from the H&E image to encode tissue architecture, annotating nodes with noisy biomarker semantic features derived from misaligned adjacent IHC sections. Furthermore, to correct for the semantic misalignment, a Graph Semantic Rectification Module (GSRM) then refines these features using graph contextual reasoning, while a Graph Semantic Consistency Loss ensures alignment between generated IHC images and rectified semantics. Additionally, we propose a dual-branch discriminator to compel the generator to match the empirical distribution of real images, significantly improving generation quality. Extensive experiments on two public benchmarks demonstrate that GSGStain significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both image quality and pathological consistency. This work establishes a new paradigm for semantically robust virtual staining.