Virtual birefringence imaging and histological staining of amyloid deposits in label-free tissue using autofluorescence microscopy and deep learning
<|reference_start|>Virtual birefringence imaging and histological staining of amyloid deposits in label-free tissue using autofluorescence microscopy and deep learning: Systemic amyloidosis is a group of diseases characterized by the deposition of misfolded proteins in various organs and tissues, leading to progressive organ dysfunction and failure. Congo red stain is the gold standard chemical stain for the visualization of amyloid deposits in tissue sections, as it forms complexes with the misfolded proteins and shows a birefringence pattern under polarized light microscopy. However, Congo red staining is tedious and costly to perform, and prone to false diagnoses due to variations in the amount of amyloid, staining quality and expert interpretation through manual examination of tissue under a polarization microscope. Here, we report the first demonstration of virtual birefringence imaging and virtual Congo red staining of label-free human tissue to show that a single trained neural network can rapidly transform autofluorescence images of label-free tissue sections into brightfield and polarized light microscopy equivalent images, matching the histochemically stained versions of the same samples. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method with blind testing and pathologist evaluations on cardiac tissue where the virtually stained images agreed well with the histochemically stained ground truth images. Our virtually stained polarization and brightfield images highlight amyloid birefringence patterns in a consistent, reproducible manner while mitigating diagnostic challenges due to variations in the quality of chemical staining and manual imaging processes as part of the clinical workflow.<|reference_end|>
@article{yang2024virtual,
    title={Virtual birefringence imaging and histological staining of amyloid
  deposits in label-free tissue using autofluorescence microscopy and deep
  learning},
    author={Xilin Yang, Bijie Bai, Yijie Zhang, Musa Aydin, Sahan Yoruc Selcuk,
  Zhen Guo, Gregory A. Fishbein, Karine Atlan, William Dean Wallace, Nir
  Pillar, Aydogan Ozcan},
    journal={Nature Communications (2024)},
    year={2024},
    doi={10.1038/s41467-024-52263-z},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.09100},
    primaryClass={physics.med-ph cs.CV cs.LG eess.IV physics.optics}
}