Abstract
Histological staining facilitates the microscopic study of diseased tissues in clinical investigations. Staining by fluorescent dyes enhances the tissue contrast, highlighting the important features. Haematoxylin and Eosin staining protocol is the most common in the histopathological analysis of cells and tissues in cancer diagnosis. HE staining provides a visual representation of tissue abnormalities, distinguishing cell nuclei and acidophilic structures. Stain unmixing is an equally vital procedure which decomposes the multi-stained image into individual stain components. These components are essential for visual examination of the interaction between the dye and the specific tissues. This manuscript put forwards an original cell destaining approach based on a three factor Nonnegative Matrix Factorization which separates the H and E components from the HE stained image. The experimental results with standard datasets and performance metrics demonstrate the robustness of the method yielding better PSNR and SSIM values for stain separation compared to similar works in this context. The PSNR values around 30 dB are achieved by the proposed unmixing approach which is more than 10 dB compared to the benchmark approaches. Similarly, the SSIM values are obtained in the range 0.42-0.73, signifying strong structural elements. The proposed method can be further extended to study the interaction of other activators in the wound repair process under cancer progression.