ODA-GAN: Orthogonal Decoupling Alignment GAN Assisted by Weakly-supervised Learning for Virtual Immunohistochemistry Staining

Recently, virtual staining has emerged as a promising alternative to revolutionize histological staining by digitally generating stains. However, most existing methods suffer from the curse of staining unreality and unreliability. In this paper, we propose the Orthogonal Decoupling Alignment Generative Adversarial Network (ODA-GAN) for unpaired virtual immunohistochemistry (IHC) staining. Our approach is based on the assumption that an image consists of IHC staining-related features, which influence staining distribution and intensity, and staining-unrelated features, such as tissue morphology. Leveraging a pathology foundation model, we first develop a weakly-supervised segmentation pipeline as an alternative to expert annotations. We introduce an Orthogonal MLP (O-MLP) module to project image features into an orthogonal space, decoupling them into staining-related and unrelated components. Additionally, we propose a Dual-stream PatchNCE (DPNCE) loss to resolve contrastive learning contradictions in the staining-related space, thereby enhancing staining accuracy. To further improve realism, we introduce a Multi-layer Domain Alignment (MDA) module to bridge the domain gap between generated and real IHC images. Evaluations on three benchmark datasets show that our ODA-GAN reaches state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ittong/ODA-GAN.