  Preparing and scanning histopathology slides consists of several steps, each
with a multitude of parameters. The parameters can vary between pathology labs
and within the same lab over time, resulting in significant variability of the
tissue appearance that hampers the generalization of automatic image analysis
methods. Typically, this is addressed with ad-hoc approaches such as staining
normalization that aim to reduce the appearance variability. In this paper, we
propose a systematic solution based on domain-adversarial neural networks. We
hypothesize that removing the domain information from the model representation
leads to better generalization. We tested our hypothesis for the problem of
mitosis detection in breast cancer histopathology images and made a comparative
analysis with two other approaches. We show that combining color augmentation
with domain-adversarial training is a better alternative than standard
approaches to improve the generalization of deep learning methods.
