Fourier Transform Infrared microspectroscopy-based super-resolution virtual staining of unlabeled tissues by pixel Diffusion Transformer

Abstract: Here, we present a diffusion transformer (DiT)-based pixel super-resolution virtual staining approach to transform low-resolution FTIR microspectroscopic images of the unstained tissues into corresponding high-resolution H&E-stained images. Unlike conventional conditional DiT architectures, this method models the transformation from FTIR images to H&E-stained images as a stochastic Brownian bridge process and directly learns the cross-domain translation in pixel space by means of a large-patch Transformer. When applied to FTIR images of unlabeled human lung tissue samples, the proposed method successfully transforms them into high-resolution H&E-stained images, achieving a 4 times pixel-level super-resolution. Additionally, by partitioning images into large patches, our method achieves a fourfold improvement in inference speed compared with traditional U-Net-based diffusion models, without compromising the quality of generated images. This super-resolution virtual staining method provides a rapid and effective solution for generating high-resolution, clinically usable H&E-stained images from infrared spectroscopic images, which can significantly facilitate the incorporation of FTIR microspectroscopy into clinical histological scenarios.