High-Resolution Medical Image Translation via Patch Alignment-Based Bidirectional Contrastive Learning

Pathology image assessment plays a crucial role in disease diagnosis and treatment. In this study, we propose a Patch alignment-based Paired medical image-to-image Translation (PPT) model that takes the Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) stained image as input and generates the corresponding Immunohistochemistry (IHC) stained image in seconds, which can bypass the laborious and time-consuming procedures of IHC staining and facilitate timely and accurate pathology assessment. First, our proposed PPT model introduces FocalNCE loss in patch-wise bidirectional contrastive learning to ensure high consistency between input and output images. Second, we propose a novel patch alignment loss to address the commonly observed misalignment issue in paired medical image datasets. Third, we incorporate content and frequency loss to produce IHC stained images with finer details. Extensive experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods, demonstrates clinical utility in pathology expert evaluation using our dataset and achieves competitive performance in two public breast cancer datasets. Lastly, we release our H&E to IHC image Translation (HIT) dataset of canine lymphoma with paired H&E-CD3 and H&E-PAX5 images, which is the first paired pathological image dataset with a high resolution of 2048 × 2048. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/coffeeNtv/PPT. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.