Evidence map›Paper›PMID 36687531›Full record

ArticleJournal of pathology informatics2023

Data-driven color augmentation for H&E stained images in computational pathology.

Niccolò Marini, Sebastian Otalora, Marek Wodzinski, Selene Tomassini, Aldo Franco Dragoni, Stephane Marchand-Maillet, Juan Pedro Dominguez Morales, Lourdes Duran-Lopez, Simona Vatrano, Henning Müller and 1 more

Open access · goldAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of pathology informatics, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
24citing papers in PubMed
7.3field-weighted citation impact, top 2% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

24 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Article
  2. Mitigating Batch Effects in Histopathology via Language-Mediated Robust Embedding Generation.Proceedings. IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · 2026
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  12. Machine learning methods for histopathological image analysis: Updates in 2024.Computational and structural biotechnology journal · 2025
    Review
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4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

11 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.

Niccolò MariniInformation Systems Institute, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO Valais), Sierre, Switzerland.
Sebastian OtaloraSupport Center for Advanced Neuroimaging, University Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Neuroradiology, Bern, Switzerland.
Marek WodzinskiInformation Systems Institute, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO Valais), Sierre, Switzerland.
Selene TomassiniDepartment of Information Engineering, Engineering Faculty, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy.
Aldo Franco DragoniDepartment of Information Engineering, Engineering Faculty, Università Politecnica delle Marche, Ancona, Italy.
Stephane Marchand-MailletCentre Universitaire d'Informatique, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland.
Juan Pedro Dominguez MoralesRobotics and Technology of Computers Lab., ETSII-EPS, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain.
Lourdes Duran-LopezRobotics and Technology of Computers Lab., ETSII-EPS, Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, Spain.
Simona VatranoPathology Unit, Gravina Hospital Caltagirone ASP, Catania, Italy.
Henning MüllerInformation Systems Institute, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO Valais), Sierre, Switzerland.
Manfredo AtzoriInformation Systems Institute, University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO Valais), Sierre, Switzerland.
HES-SO University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland · CHMarche Polytechnic University · ITUniversidad de Sevilla · ESUniversity of Geneva · CH

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Computational pathology targets the automatic analysis of Whole Slide Images (WSI). WSIs are high-resolution digitized histopathology images, stained with chemical reagents to highlight specific tissue structures and scanned via whole slide scanners. The application of different parameters during WSI acquisition may lead to stain color heterogeneity, especially considering samples collected from several medical centers. Dealing with stain color heterogeneity often limits the robustness of methods developed to analyze WSIs, in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), the state-of-the-art algorithm for most computational pathology tasks. Stain color heterogeneity is still an unsolved problem, although several methods have been developed to alleviate it, such as Hue-Saturation-Contrast (HSC) color augmentation and stain augmentation methods. The goal of this paper is to present Data-Driven Color Augmentation (DDCA), a method to improve the efficiency of color augmentation methods by increasing the reliability of the samples used for training computational pathology models. During CNN training, a database including over 2 million H&E color variations collected from private and public datasets is used as a reference to discard augmented data with color distributions that do not correspond to realistic data. DDCA is applied to HSC color augmentation, stain augmentation and H&E-adversarial networks in colon and prostate cancer classification tasks. DDCA is then compared with 11 state-of-the-art baseline methods to handle color heterogeneity, showing that it can substantially improve classification performance on unseen data including heterogeneous color variations.

Indexed as

Color augmentationComputational pathologyDeep learningDigital pathologyHistopathologyStain variability

Identifiers

PMID36687531
PMCPMC9852546
OpenAlexW4313529762

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
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Registered trials

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.