Effects of Color Stain Normalization in Histopathology Image Retrieval using Deep Learning

In the last decade, many digital slides have been available in the pathological field thanks to the spreading of new technologies for computerized acquisition. Often hardware and software tools and devices are different among biomedical analysis centers; consequently, the digital slides do not have the same representation using different colorization, exposition, contrast, brightness, and other distortions. Many computer vision algorithms are sensitive to these differences, and, in specific tasks such as image retrieval, color stain normalization can be a helpful technique to mitigate this misunderstanding. In this paper, we explored the effects of color stain normalization in the patches based on Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) image retrieval to measure how and how much it impacts the accuracy of this task providing an exhaustive analysis employing a standard dataset.