Papers › Fast GPU-Enabled Color Normalization for Digital Pathology

Fast GPU-Enabled Color Normalization for Digital Pathology

10 Jan 2019arXiv:1901.03088archive 2025-07-28

Goutham Ramakrishnan, Deepak Anand, Amit Sethi

Normalizing unwanted color variations due to differences in staining processes and scanner responses has been shown to aid machine learning in computational pathology. Of the several popular techniques for color normalization, structure preserving color normalization (SPCN) is well-motivated, convincingly tested, and published with its code base. However, SPCN makes occasional errors in color basis estimation leading to artifacts such as swapping the color basis vectors between stains or giving a colored tinge to the background with no tissue. We made several algorithmic improvements to remove these artifacts. Additionally, the original SPCN code is not readily usable on gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) due to long run times, use of proprietary software platform and libraries, and its inability to automatically handle WSIs. We completely rewrote the software such that it can automatically handle images of any size in popular WSI formats. Our software utilizes GPU-acceleration and open-source libraries that are becoming ubiquitous with the advent of deep learning. We also made several other small improvements and achieved a multifold overall speedup on gigapixel images. Our algorithm and software is usable right out-of-the-box by the computational pathology community.

PaperPDFCode

Code

MEDAL-IITB/Fast_WSI_Color_Norm officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubtf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Color Normalizationwhole slide images

1 archive task tag without a task page not shown.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections