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Abstracts & Posters

Vol. 1 No. S1 (2025): Special Issue: 2025 Geisel Research Poster Night

VirtualPNN: Deep Learning for Label-free Visualization of Perineuronal Nets in Brain Tissue

Submitted
21 December 2025
Published
27-12-2025

Abstract

Perineuronal nets (PNNs) are extracellular matrix structures that modulate inhibitory interneuron activity and may contribute to brain tumor–related epilepsy. Because immunohistochemistry (IHC) destroys tissue and is time-intensive, this study introduces VirtualPNN, a generative AI model that simulates aggrecan IHC staining directly from H&E slides. Trained using paired H&E–IHC images and an anti-vessel loss objective, VirtualPNN produced high-fidelity stains, outperforming AI-FFPE, CycleGAN, CUT, and FastCUT, as demonstrated by the lowest Fréchet Inception Distance score. A visual Turing test with board-certified neuropathologists showed high fooling rates, confirming realistic outputs. Importantly, the model minimized false-positive staining of blood vessels through its anti-vessel loss component. VirtualPNN offers a label-free, tissue-preserving method to study PNNs and may serve as a tool for correlating PNN distribution with epilepsy severity in tumor patients. Ongoing work includes validation across larger cohorts and extension to additional staining markers.

References

  1. References are available on the poster PDF.