# H&E staining (haematoxylin and eosin)

Source: https://onco.cc/terms/h-and-e-staining/  
OnCo record `h-and-e-staining` (Term). Data CC BY-NC 4.0, attribute "Data from OnCo (onco.cc)"; commercial use needs a licence.

## TL;DR

H&E is the purple and pink stain on almost every pathology slide: haematoxylin colours cell nuclei blue-purple and eosin colours the cytoplasm and connective tissue pink.

## Summary

Haematoxylin and eosin stain is one of the principal tissue stains in histology, the most widely used in medical diagnosis and often the gold standard; a biopsy of a suspected cancer will almost always be stained with H&E (Wikipedia). Because it is universal and cheap, digitised H&E slides are the input to pathology foundation models, which learn to predict grade, molecular alterations and outcome from morphology alone.

## Fields

- Kind: Term
- Last checked: 2026-09-24
- Also known as: H&E staining; H&E stain; H&E slide; H&E slides; haematoxylin and eosin; hematoxylin and eosin; H&E section
- Tags: cansim-terms

## Notes

- Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/h-and-e-staining.

## Sources

- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%26E_stain
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%26E_stain

## Connected records

- terms: [Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)](https://onco.cc/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/), [Digital pathology and whole-slide images (WSI)](https://onco.cc/terms/digital-pathology-wsi/), [Tile and patch encoding of slides](https://onco.cc/terms/tile-patch-encoding/)
- technologies: [Digital pathology & AI](https://onco.cc/technologies/digital-pathology-ai/), [Histopathology & immunohistochemistry](https://onco.cc/technologies/histopathology-ihc/)

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JSON: https://onco.cc/api/v1/entities/h-and-e-staining.json